The Listening Mind

Is Owning All Our Music in Physical Format Practical for the Long Term?
Rethinking what it means to build and preserve a lifetime music collection

For most of my life, owning music meant owning something I could hold in my hands. A record came in a sleeve with artwork large enough to study. A cassette slipped into a case and traveled easily from the house to the car. A CD reduced the size of the package but preserved the basic idea. I paid for an album, brought it home, placed it on a shelf and it became part of my music collection. 

After nearly sixty years of listening to and acquiring music, however, I've had to confront a practical question that probably never occurred to me when I began buying records as a teenager: What if I had kept everything? 

Every record. Every cassette. Every CD. 

If I still owned every piece of physical music that has passed through my hands since the 1960s, I'd probably need several rooms dedicated simply to storing it. Thousands of CDs require shelves. Thousands of LPs require even more substantial storage, and they're heavy. Add the physical media that might accumulate during another decade of listening and eventually the music collection starts dictating how part of your house must be used. 

That doesn't make me opposed to physical media. Far from it. For those of us who grew up with records and CDs, there's something about holding music in our hands that a digital file can't completely replace. 

Putting a record on a turntable is an intentional act. So is removing a CD from its case, putting it in the player and sitting down with the booklet. Album covers, liner notes, photographs and artwork became part of our relationship with the music. Some physical albums eventually become inseparable from particular times in our lives. The worn cover or slightly battered jewel case can carry memories right alongside the music. 

That's one reason I understand the resurgence of vinyl. Music became almost completely intangible during the streaming era, and some listeners wanted the object back. 

But wanting physical music and needing our entire music collection to exist physically are two different things. 

There's another consideration that has increasingly become part of discussions about physical media: its environmental impact. 

Records and CDs have to be manufactured. Vinyl uses PVC. CDs use polycarbonate and other materials. Both require industrial manufacturing, packaging and transportation before they ever reach our homes. Vinyl in particular carries a substantial environmental cost. 

At first glance, streaming would seem to solve much of that problem. Nothing has to be pressed, packaged or shipped to the listener. Tap the screen and the music appears. 

Except the music hasn't actually appeared from nowhere. 

Streaming requires data centers, servers, networks and electricity every time we request a recording. The environmental cost of a single stream may be small, but repeated listening changes the equation. Some research has suggested that streaming an album roughly a few dozen times can consume energy comparable to manufacturing and distributing a CD, although exact estimates vary considerably depending upon how the calculations are made. 

That's an important distinction. 

Physical media has a substantial portion of its environmental cost up front. Manufacture the record, ship it to me and that particular copy can potentially remain in my collection for the rest of my life. Streaming distributes more of its impact across repeated use. Every time I return to an album, the data has to travel to me again. 

For someone who listens to an album once or twice and moves on, streaming may make considerable environmental sense. But many music lovers don't listen that way. 

I've returned to favorite albums for decades. 

Ambient music almost encourages that kind of relationship. These aren't necessarily recordings we consume for a few weeks before replacing them with something new. A favorite ambient album can become part of the landscape of our lives, something we might hear dozens or hundreds of times over many years. 

That's when another possibility becomes particularly interesting.

The modern discussion about music consumption frequently seems to offer us two choices: physical media or streaming. 

Something important has been left out. The download. 

I buy and download much of the ambient, electronic and new age music I listen to through Bandcamp. I can download an album as FLAC or WAV files and store those files on my own hard drive. Once I've downloaded the music, I don't have to retrieve it from a streaming service every time I want to hear it. 

I possess the files. 

That distinction matters to me. 

Streaming has given us access to a staggering amount of music, and as a discovery tool it's extraordinary. But access and ownership aren't the same thing. A streaming catalog can change. Albums can disappear. Licensing agreements can expire. Services can alter their terms or, theoretically, disappear themselves. 

A music collection built entirely upon streaming ultimately exists somewhere other than in my possession. 

A downloaded FLAC file stored on my own drive is different. Once I've legitimately purchased and downloaded it, I can continue listening without depending upon the continued availability of a particular streaming catalog. 

There are environmental advantages as well. The file has to be transmitted when I initially download it, but afterward I can play my local copy repeatedly rather than requesting another transmission of the album every time I listen. 

That doesn't make local digital storage environmentally invisible. Hard drives have to be manufactured. They require electricity and eventually wear out. Computers, DACs, amplifiers and the rest of our audio equipment have environmental footprints of their own. 

But one hard drive can contain an extraordinary amount of music. 

An 8TB drive can potentially contain thousands upon thousands of albums in lossless formats. Imagine the physical space necessary to store the equivalent number of CDs or LPs. What might once have required an entire room can now occupy a small space on a desk. 

Technology finally gave us the ability to own an enormous music collection without needing an enormous place to put it, just as the music industry began convincing us that we didn't need to own our music at all. 

There's an irony in that worth considering.

Digital ownership does create another obligation. A hard drive isn't permanent. Drives fail. 

Anyone building a serious digital music library needs backups. If I have thousands of albums stored on one drive and that drive dies tomorrow, I don't want decades of collecting disappearing with it. 

So perhaps an 8TB music library requires another 8TB drive as a backup, and ideally another copy stored somewhere separately. That's still considerably easier to accommodate than several thousand CDs, but digital ownership requires us to become the librarians and archivists of our own collections. 

Physical media has similar responsibilities. Records can be scratched, CDs damaged and collections lost to fire, floods or other disasters. Nothing we own comes with a guarantee of permanence. 

The real question is how much responsibility and physical space we're willing to devote to preserving the music that matters to us. 

This is where I've arrived at a compromise that makes increasingly more sense to me. 

Perhaps we don't need to stop buying physical music. We simply need to decide which music deserves to become physical. 

There will always be albums that I want to hold. 

For listeners of my generation and those adjacent to it, the physical object carries a nostalgia that shouldn't be dismissed as mere sentimentality. Records and CDs were how we experienced music for much of our lives. The act of choosing an album from a shelf and placing it on a turntable or in a CD player is connected to decades of listening habits. 

Some albums are important enough that owning the physical object means something beyond having access to the recording. 

Let those albums have shelf space. 

But does every album I enjoy need to occupy shelf space for the rest of my life? 

I'm no longer convinced that it does. 

Perhaps the digital collection can become the library while the physical collection becomes the personal archive. 

The library might contain thousands of albums stored locally in lossless formats and properly backed up. The physical archive might contain the recordings that mean the most to us, albums connected with particular memories, musical discoveries, artists or periods of our lives. 

There's room for streaming in this ecosystem as well. Streaming can be an extraordinarily useful way to discover music before deciding whether we want a permanent relationship with it. 

That suggests a model that seems increasingly sensible to me: 

Streaming for discovery. 

Downloads for ownership. 

Physical media for attachment. 

Those aren't rules. Every listener will draw the lines differently. Someone with the space and desire to own 10,000 LPs should certainly enjoy that collection. Someone else may be perfectly satisfied with streaming everything. There's no single correct way to have a relationship with recorded music. 

But after a lifetime of listening, I'm increasingly interested in preserving the music rather than accumulating every possible container that holds it. And perhaps that's the distinction we've overlooked. 

The resurgence of vinyl demonstrates that physical media still has meaning. The continued existence of CDs demonstrates that convenience and ownership don't have to be opposites. Streaming has opened a nearly limitless world of discovery. And downloadable lossless music gives us another option that somehow receives far less attention than it deserves. 

We don't have to choose between filling our homes with physical media and renting our musical lives indefinitely from streaming services. 

We can still own our music. 

We just don't necessarily have to own all of the objects that contain it. 

Maybe that's what a music collection can become in the twenty-first century: thousands of recordings preserved in a space small enough to hold in one hand, accompanied by a carefully chosen collection of records and CDs sitting on the shelves nearby. 

The hard drive can become the library. 

And the shelves can become the autobiography.

Michael Foster, editor Ambient Visions