I was Lars Ulrich's nightmare.

Yesterday I helped my friend Adam with iTunes. He has a PC and we have a Mac, and we were extolling the virtues of iTunes to him, because he is really into music and we were trying to get him interested in podcasts. I neglected to tell him to not mess with the iTunes folder, which I learned the hard way. He downloaded an album, but he couldn't burn it to a CD nor put it on his mp3 player (I think it was a Philips brand, but I'm not sure). We went over there yesterday and I helped him fix it. He said that he had been using Napster to download music in the interim, as it came bundled with his PC or Vista, I'm not sure which. I hadn't thought of Napster in a long time, despite seeing ads for it on TV and around the internet. I remember those halcyon days of Napster, when paying for music on the internet seemed ridiculous...

I downloaded my first mp3 in 1998. I had no idea what it was or why it was important. All I knew was that R.E.M. was putting out a new album (this was right after Bill Berry left the band), and I could hear the song Daysleeper before it was released. I read up on it and discovered that I had to download an mp3 player in order to hear the song, as well as the mp3 of course. I downloaded the player first and installed it, then I downloaded the song, which I think was a little over 3 MB. 1 hour later (we still had 56K dialup), I was listening to the new R.E.M. song! I thought it was amazing. Music was never a big thing on my PC as the wav files were too big, although I did have a collection of sounds and soundbites that I made and downloaded.

As mp3s became more popular, there were many more places to go to get them. I was really into Usenet back then, mainly for the conversation. mp3 Usenet groups started popping up, and are still very popular today. Then the peer-to-peer programs, mainly Napster, started up, and for me, there was no turning back. I started downloading Beatles bootlegs that I could only dream of getting. They were usually 30 to 40 bucks for a single CD and were hard to find. Now they were free and right in my computer! I downloaded tons of R.E.M. concerts that I also never would have found "in the wild." My downloading got out of hand when we got a cable modem, and instead of setting the PC to download stuff all night long, I could download the same stuff in minutes. I crammed my hard drive to bursting with music that I wanted to hear but couldn't afford, which included a lot of indie stuff like Guided By Voices, Sleater-Kinney, Superchunk, Wilco, Aimee Mann, etc. I had to burn a lot of stuff to disc and take it off the hard drive to make room for more! At this time, I was still a member at Sam's Club, and I would buy the 100 pack of blank CDs in the slimline cases (without the spine). I would print a makeshift label for the case and write on the CD with a felt-tip marker, then put the CD in with my store-bought CDs. This eventually created a problem, as I was rapidly running out of room on the CD shelf.

The bottom fell out of the whole Napster thing and then I was left with just Usenet, but that quickly lost its appeal. I started to have a crisis of conscience; I felt bad that I had taken all that indie music for free, as most of those artists were not as well off as the Beatles or R.E.M. (R.E.M. doesn't really care about bootlegs, and I always buy whatever they and the Beatles put out. The Beatles have a LOT of my money, so I don't feel guilty about the bootlegs). I started to root through the stuff I stole and threw away a lot of it, mostly because I never even listened to it. I saved the stuff that I did listen to, and I slowly began to replace it with the store bought versions. I hated the way that the slimline cases looked in my CD shelf, so I bought some bookshelf-style CD books and put them in there. It looks much better now. :)

Lately I have noticed that there is still stuff that I don't ever listen to in those bookshelf cases, so I'm going to go through them again soon. I think that as I have gotten older, music is more of a comfort to me than an adventure, because I tend to listen to the same stuff over and over again, which is too bad. I love to buy CDs, but I just can't afford everything I want, and I don't want to get it illegally anymore. I'm the kind of guy that would rather have a CD or record in my hand than buy it from iTunes. Who knows, maybe that will change in my future, but for right now, I still enjoy the physical part of music along with the mental (and aural) part.