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The futility of the CD cabinet

Two Sundays back I made loose with a morning hour and cut out the pieces for a new CD rack, which will go in the back room and, finally, house all the compilations which haven't been unboxed, nor filed, since we moved here better than three years ago. It will, I suppose, be the last one I build. With any luck, I'll get it finished before they quit making the things.

And they will, just as they've quit making vinyl, mostly, and cassettes and eight-tracks and 78s and reel-to-reel tapes for consumer consumption. I do not mourn the loss of all those things, but I mourn still, and before it's really happened, the disappearance of the musical object.

We have a CD player stationed in every room of this house (and out in the garage, if I ever had time to make sawdust) where I might wish to listen, and it still pleases me, as it did back in college, to play something loud while I warm my hands in the dishwater. I do not commute. I have no need of an iPod, no place on my desktop for speakers so that this wretched computer can be asked to do one more thing.

I do not adapt to change well, apparently.

Many years ago I was a typesetter. Eventually I might have been a typographer and put on airs, but mostly I typed fast and clean (and rewrote surreptitiously, and corrected spelling, which typesetters were said not to do, but we all did because setting correction lines was a nuisance) and was good enough for newspaper work. Because there was no work for a young writer when I was graduated from the University of Washington in 1982, and because the two typesetting shops where I worked to support my vinyl and Top Ramen habits during college had failed, I bought (with the help of my parents) a typesetting machine and went into business.

I nurtured the delusion, initially, that I would work four hours a day and write fiction. Instead, I worked 12-16 hours a day, weeks without a break, and wrote nothing. Haven't really written fiction since, not counting the odd artist's bio. Sitting at my machine on Westlake Avenue watching the rich people tend to their yachts. Not, in memory, a happy time. There was a moment at one of the yachting bars we went after work when one of my office partners moved her hands at a particularly ill-timed moment and a tray of beer poured over me. The server looked at me for a second and apologized, said, "Generally we offer to pay for dry cleaning, but in your case..." Band T-shirts take beer well, though I feared being pulled over on my way home that night.

In 1986 I sold that business (basically recouping the cost of the machine) because I saw the MacIntosh coming and with it the end of my brief days knowing I had a portable trade and was employable anywhere in the United States, and beyond. I set type through 1992 at The Rocket, but that's largely because computers were expensive and desktop publishing wasn't yet capable of competing with the EditWriter.

I have, in this space, been revisiting my past a lot recently. Part of the reason for that is that I begin to feel very much as I did when the computer put me out of business. I feel dread, and uncertainty.

A while back our Canadian correspondent, Paul Cantin, sent along a paragraph from, I suspect, Billboard, talking about album sales: "Only two albums crossed the 100,000 mark last week, but one of them had a huge debut. Linkin Park's Minutes To Midnight (Warner Bros) debuted with sales of 622,000 (13% digital), giving the album the biggest single sales week of the year. (Norah Jones' Not Too Late was the previous best.) Tank's Sex Love & Pain (Blackground Records) debuted at #2 with sales of 103,000 (1% digital). Wilco's Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch) had a big first week with sales of 87,000 (23% digital) and a #4 showing. Gretchen Wilson's One of the Boys (Sony) debuted at #5 with 73,000 (5% digital). At #8, Megadeth's United Abominations sold 54,000 (5% digital)."

I am struck by how puny the digital component of those sales figures really is, in the main. And by how modest the numbers are in comparison to what the industry used to sell. Remember when Hootie and the Blowfish shifted 16-million units? Anybody imagine somebody will beat Garth Brooks' total sales record in our lifetime?

One hears that this will be the last Christmas for the compact disc, that they'll quit making the things in four years. The time frame is open to debate, but the inevitability of the thing is apparently not.

My strong sense is that the music industry will end up being a case history for how not to adapt to changing technologies. James Fallows once wrote in The Atlantic, after having briefly consulted for Microsoft in the development of a new Word package, that software is written for major corporations which will buy hundreds and thousands of licenses, and that the concerns of individual users, of single-license purchasers, are not of interest to software developers. It is expected that many individuals will copy the software, and it is such a financially insignificant portion of their profits that they don't care, not even enough to design the product for our particular and unique needs.

The only corporate entities which can and will pay for digital rights are going to end up being radio conglomerates, movie and television studios, and whatever internet and satellite broadcasting enterprises survive the sorting. Individuals are accustomed to, um, borrowing (and I should add that I have purchased all the software on this machine; I think, but it was not always so in the leaner years) software. And that's how they treat, how they're going to treat digital music.

Sales are down. The labels claim it's because various kinds of peer to peer copying are eroding sales. Critics suspect it's because the labels have lost their knack (hah!) for finding and promoting stars, that the music itself is in a fallow state, and/or that there are now so many releases and the market is so diffuse that it will become more difficult for multi-million sellers to emerge.

I think it's because music has often been an impulse buy, a last-minute present, something to listen to fresh on the way home from the mall. I think it's because the destruction of the record store network has eliminated the most powerful marketing tool the music industry has had since radio consolidated and filled every possible moment with commercials and claptrap. I think it's because consumers buy objects, not intangible files.

This is my age showing. Kids today, they're different.

Sure. They're more computer savvy than I'll ever be. But it's not the tool, it's what one does with it. And whatever kids today are doing, they're not buying music, at least not in numbers which compare to what kids of my generation did.

Artists increasingly send links to soundfiles, hoping I'll listen. Every once in a while I do, but mostly I just delete the e-mail. There are still far too many CDs stacked around me wanting to be heard. Some day, I suppose, I'll have to buy speakers for this poor, over-worked machine.

Or I'll have to find something else to do.

I am not anxious to do that. If you have read more than a line or two from my fingers you will know that publishing No Depression -- getting to write about what I wish, discovering so much great music, and designing the whole package -- is the best gig I've ever had (save being Maggie's dad). The best gig I will ever have.

But I really, truly, do not know what I will do that cold morning whenever it arrives when music is available only as an MP3 file, or whatever comes to supplant that format. I think I'll dig out Robbie Fulks' song, "She Took A Lot Of Pills (And Died)" and play it at high volume, just as I did when I was first discovering the music we write about in these pages.

And then, perhaps, I'll go out to the garage and build a shelf for all the books on the floor in here.

Posted by grant on June 21, 2007 9:16 AM | Permalink