Like many people, I’ve been in two minds whether or not to get rid of my CD collection and commit fully to digital music, but without ever really coming to a definitive answer.
Since the recent launch of Apple Music, I find myself asking this very question, again. So what are the benefits of digital vs physical music?
I’m in my 30’s, so I’ve grown up with vinyl, cassette tapes, and CDs and currently own about 175 CDs. I started buying digital music from Amazon MP3 in early 2011 as an easy way to ditch my CD single collection and to fill the gaps of the songs I wanted to own but didn’t care to buy the entire album. Seems like the perfect mix, right? Wrong. Because then I bought an iPhone.
Apple’s iTunes changed digital music for me. It provided the instant gratification of the retail store experience but with the added convenience of being able to buy music from the comfort of your pajamas. So naturally, I sold all my physical CDs and replaced them with their digital counterparts, right? Wrong. Not only would that have been horrendously expensive, I still had that nagging voice in the back of my head that wouldn’t shut up about CD-quality being better and putting all your eggs into one basket in case someone eventually surpasses Apple in the mobile phone experience. Although because of Apple’s continued stranglehold on internal storage sizes on their iDevices, it is mighty handy to be able to delete music and re-download other music you own on a whim.
So what about digital streaming services? I’ve tried Spotify, Napster, and more recently Apple Music. I guess the question here is purely economical – if you’re not buying 10-12 albums every year, is streaming really worth the monthly fee? I’ve bought 6 CDs in the last year and that’s probably more than average for me, so when my 3 month Apple Music trial is over, I highly doubt I’ll renew it as I’m still living in the ’90s.
Enter Pearl Jam’s Ten album.
Pearl Jam is one of my all-time favorite bands and their Ten album is probably at the top of my list for best album ever. I bought the CD version back in Australia in the early ’90s and have been listening to it on a regular basis ever since. So naturally, I thought it would be nice to have the digital version on tap from the cloud. Especially when moving house and having to put my CD collection into storage for a while.
This is where my biggest gripe with digital music lies.
The version of Pearl Jam’s Ten available on iTunes UK (and Apple Music UK) is NOT the original version. Having owned the CD version for some 20 years, I know that album inside out. Much to my disgust, the epic 2-minute guitar solo from the track Alive has been replaced with a new and third-rate version which totally ruins the entire Ten experience for me. Now obviously this is solely Pearl Jam’s record company’s fault for uploading something other than the original to the digital music services, but thank god I didn’t make a huge mistake by getting rid of my CDs.
So why haven’t I mentioned iTunes Match yet? Given how iTunes Match has evolved since its debut in 2010, annoyingly, this is now actually looking like the solution to my problem. The reason I dismissed it the first time round was CD rips were matched to the exiting iTunes catalog. Unfortunately for me a lot of the bands I like hadn’t (and still haven’t *cough*Tool*cough*) bought into the digital age of music, so a match wasn’t available. However, with Apple’s iCloud service this is no longer an issue as iTunes Match will upload your CD rip if it’s not in their iTunes catalog – although I still have to see if iTunes Match passes the Pearl Jam Ten test (but initial Apple Music tests indicate it plays what I’ve synced rather than what’s in iTunes).
Although CDs will always have a special place in my heart, I still feel they’ve had their day, and it’s time to focus on digital going forward. And in the end, I guess I won’t miss: the switch from plastic to cardboard sleeves, illegible lyrics (or none at all), the space they take up, and that nothing has a CD player in it anymore.
UPDATE: So I got iTunes Match finally and it passed the Pearl Jam Alive test. I have the original Ten CD ripped on my PC and after wiping the music on my iPhone I can stream the correct version of Alive from my iCloud – not the botched solo version from iTunes. And my Tool albums that aren’t even on iTunes are now also in my iCloud ready to stream back to my iDevices. Yay!
