CD’s v Vinyl’s v Piracy

As a kid I was a faithful vinyl collector, and even though CD’s and digital mediums of storing music was introduced when I was growing up, my love for vinyl records was unshakable. You would never catch me buying a digital copy of an album and I was proud of it. I had my crappy record player that my dad gave me from back in the 70’s, which sounded pretty bad, and didn’t do much justice to the artists I was buying: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, the list is endless and I should probably stop it here before it becomes just a comprehensive catalogue of my iTunes collection. But it didn’t matter. Because it was vintage to me. It was the original sound to me. It was all about the vinyl and I could never cheat on vinyl records with flimsy, disgusting digital CD’s because digital was all wrong.

But now, people buying digital doesn’t bother me at all. And why’s that? Because now, all kids seem to do is download illegally pirated copies of albums. If I wanted to steal an album back when I was a kid, I’d have to somehow convince one of my parents to take me to my favorite record store, create a diversion so they would leave me alone for a while, somehow subtly slip a 12 inch record that’s inside a case that’s 4 times the size of a digital CD underneath my jumper, pretend like everything’s cool and I haven’t just committed a crime in front of about 20 other shoppers, convince my parents I’m bored and changed my mind and want to go home, and then quickly duck out of the shop without anyone noticing that I suddenly have a square stomach, which is actually the record that I just stole because I wasn’t committed enough to the artist to pay a mere 20 bucks for their album. So yeah, essentially impossible.

So when I hear these days that kids don’t pay anything for music, it’s a little bit heartbreaking. One, because my dedication to vinyl albums is sacred, and has been since I was a kid. Two, because of the lengthy process I just typed above that I would’ve had to go through to get an album for free. And three, because music piracy is just not right with me, and I stick by my childhood ideals of worshipping awesome albums and awesome artists. But it sucks that kids these days don’t uphold those kinds of values.