SAVE THE CDs!!

 A week or so ago on Twitter B.E. (Before Elon), a TikTok video made the rounds. 

In it, a young Zennial (or whatever the proper term for a teen-early 20’s person is these days) is trying to get her Gen-X mom to get rid of her piles of CDs. Mom is not having it. 

As Mom goes on to explain “I got rid of my albums, and then they came back… I am not doing this again.” But moooom, I can find a song digitally faster than you can open a CD. “No. I don’t remember the songs that I like. I like seeing them and going ‘Oh, I like Oingo Boingo.’”

Now, I am sure the intent of the young person was to show how crazy her Mom was, hanging on to her hunks of plastic rather than ripping them into the cloud, but the internet comments I saw were squarely on her side. (And also gave her props for liking Oingo Boingo.)

That last comment especially gets to the heart of it. After a summer full of headlines about various media companies pulling content off their platforms, there’s been a heightened awareness about the drawbacks of getting everything out of the cloud.

When you buy a book or a movie digitally, you don’t actually own it. You own a license that lets you view a product on a platform for an indefinite period of time. So if Amazon loses the rights to that particular edition or version, yoink! It can disappear from your playlist or library without warning. Ironically, one of the first times this came to light was over an edition of 1984 that Amazon secretly deleted from their customer’s libraries.  

Oh, did you expect our corporate overlords will maintain and curate a library of classics for us out of the goodness of their blackened hearts? As the new overlords of HBO spent all summer reminding us, they consider tax breaks to be more important than happy consumers. They deleted a Batgirl movie (featuring Michael Keaton returning as Batman, no less!) that now no one will ever get to see because they wanted a tax write off. They purged hundreds of episodes of cartoons without warning, leaving the creators scrambling to get hard copies of their work. (HBO even nuked the clips off of YouTube, which meant the animators had literally nothing to point to for examples of their work.)

Now, I am not about to stop streaming and delete all my kindle books and turn off Netflix. I have literally had a cheap bookshelf collapse under the weight of books I piled onto it. (And good thing I wasn’t asleep at the time, because that one was next to my side of the bed.) I love the convenience of being able to buy a book or get one out of the library while sitting on the couch. I love having the ability to stream just about anything that strikes my fancy. 

But…

There are still lots of things you can’t stream or download. Like one of my favorite books ever, Hot Seat by Frank Rich. It’s a collection of theatre reviews by one of the best in the business and essential reading for any fan of Broadway from the latter part of the 20th century. It’s out of print and not available on kindle. Same for one of my Mom’s favorite weird books, The California Coven Project. I hung onto my VHS copies of Ladyhawke and the Rankin-Bass Hobbit for years because they weren’t available in any other format. Oh, and good luck finding one of the very best TV shows of the 90s, Homicide: Life on the Streets, in any format anywhere. And that’s not even getting into the special features on DVDs that aren’t available on streaming - like commentary tracks and Making Of featurettes and deleted scenes.

And music! There are a ton of CDs in my rack that aren’t available elsewhere. Bands I saw in college, waaay before the dawn of Napster, that I bought a CD from at the merch table. Musicals, jazz groups, local bands, none of which have been popular enough to make a leap to streaming. 

So no, I will not be ditching all of my DVDs or CDs either. Like the mom in the TikTok video, I too will be hanging onto my old music. 

Now let’s hear some Oingo Boingo!