TUNEAGE!
I am a longtime frequenter of used record stores. When my collection was vinyl, I used such stores as a place to fill the gaps in my knowledge of music (and score the occasional cool bit of album cover art), but by the time I hit grad school, I had shifted gears a bit. For one thing, that was the year I got my first CD player, and from then on I was engaged partly in obtaining new music and partly in replacing my vinyl collection. The key difference now, however, was that I was not only a) broke, and b) working part-time at a radio station, but also c) working at a record store. This last meant that, for the first time, I got a significant discount on new discs--and in grad school, the difference between a list price CD and an employee-discounted CD was profound.
But partly as a result of my years in the record store, I developed a deep-seated urge to avoid paying full price for ANY disc. If a new album came out that I was desperate to own, I might pick it up, but if it was a back-catalog purchase, or an old LP I wanted to replace in digital form, I was reluctant to drop the full price for a new disc. Instead, I started flipping through the used CD bins at places like Chapel Hill's Backdoor Records, or Plan 9 Music in Richmond, or even the former bowling alley in San Francisco that became Amoeba Music. There I was almost always able to find a few items to purchase at well below their normal cost--and if I couldn't, well, there was always the next time I was in town.
I also started ordering discs online. Often, they were used (and cheap), but sometimes I could find a NEW disc for well below what I'd have expected to pay at the Record Bar years back, and as far as I was concerned, such bargains were just as good as buying used ones--often better, since the discs were typically in better condition.
Those habits were ingrained enough that I have never entirely gone over to downloading. I own a few downloaded songs, yes, but I don't really feel as though they're mine. Without the physical disc (and the accompanying information in album covers, booklets, liner notes, etc.) in my possession, I feel like I'm just listening in to someone else's stuff, and as a result, the music never really sinks in. So to this day, with music stores rapidly going the way of the Passenger Pigeon, I'm still there, picking through the used bins, preying on bargains as more and more people abandon their CDs in favor of digital downloads.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I just got a bunch of new (and new/old) CDs, three from a visit to Plan 9 and three from Amazon. I'm very happy. I should warn you, though, that my somewhat eclectic tastes are revealed in the titles:
Ben Folds Five/Naked Baby Pictures (used for $5)
Cloud Cult/The Meaning of 8 (new from Amazon)
Genesis/Nursery Cryme (used for $6)
The Specials/(self-titled debut) (new from Amazon)
The Velvet Underground & Nico/(self-titled debut) (used for $5)
Rick Wakeman/The Six Wives of Henry VIII (new from Amazon)
I'm sure there's something there for everyone to find unappealing--possibly even the idea of owning music in hard copy. Take it for what you will.
But partly as a result of my years in the record store, I developed a deep-seated urge to avoid paying full price for ANY disc. If a new album came out that I was desperate to own, I might pick it up, but if it was a back-catalog purchase, or an old LP I wanted to replace in digital form, I was reluctant to drop the full price for a new disc. Instead, I started flipping through the used CD bins at places like Chapel Hill's Backdoor Records, or Plan 9 Music in Richmond, or even the former bowling alley in San Francisco that became Amoeba Music. There I was almost always able to find a few items to purchase at well below their normal cost--and if I couldn't, well, there was always the next time I was in town.
I also started ordering discs online. Often, they were used (and cheap), but sometimes I could find a NEW disc for well below what I'd have expected to pay at the Record Bar years back, and as far as I was concerned, such bargains were just as good as buying used ones--often better, since the discs were typically in better condition.
Those habits were ingrained enough that I have never entirely gone over to downloading. I own a few downloaded songs, yes, but I don't really feel as though they're mine. Without the physical disc (and the accompanying information in album covers, booklets, liner notes, etc.) in my possession, I feel like I'm just listening in to someone else's stuff, and as a result, the music never really sinks in. So to this day, with music stores rapidly going the way of the Passenger Pigeon, I'm still there, picking through the used bins, preying on bargains as more and more people abandon their CDs in favor of digital downloads.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I just got a bunch of new (and new/old) CDs, three from a visit to Plan 9 and three from Amazon. I'm very happy. I should warn you, though, that my somewhat eclectic tastes are revealed in the titles:
Ben Folds Five/Naked Baby Pictures (used for $5)
Cloud Cult/The Meaning of 8 (new from Amazon)
Genesis/Nursery Cryme (used for $6)
The Specials/(self-titled debut) (new from Amazon)
The Velvet Underground & Nico/(self-titled debut) (used for $5)
Rick Wakeman/The Six Wives of Henry VIII (new from Amazon)
I'm sure there's something there for everyone to find unappealing--possibly even the idea of owning music in hard copy. Take it for what you will.