Snippet: The Deleted Years ☇

Dave Holmes for Esquire:

But if you were an early adopter of Apple Music Store, as I was, everything you bought from 2003 to 2009 is stuck on a dusty iPod for which a charger can no longer be found, or on a MacBook that’s three MacBooks ago. Whether you bought that whole first Kaiser Chiefs album or just plunked down the 99 cents for “I Predict A Riot,” you don’t have it anymore. It simply does not exist for you, and it didn’t even leave behind a record sleeve to let you know it ever did. Now the era is over, and only a handful of neglected Maxell compact discs reminds me that I used to be really into The Pipettes.

It seems that the point of the article is to highlight the changing music consumption from the 2000s that lost a lot of songs between physical media and streaming services, which is true for a lot of people. I think I may be the outlier in that I can account for this era quite well—and not just because it was basically the soundtrack of my college years. I used to make playlists for what I added to my library during specific times (typically related to academic terms), and they’ve survived to this day, so I could go back and tell you what was new for me in the Spring 2005 semester (“I Predict A Riot” happens to be there).

Currently, I don’t subscribe to a streaming service of any kind, but rather have been adding to an iTunes Library that originally started with my iBook G3 back in 2002. In meticulous Rob Gordon fashion, my music library was one of the most important things on my computer at that time (probably outside of any class work). It’s migrated from one Mac to another, one iPod to another (later iPhones), but the advent of iTunes Match has made it almost like a streaming service in that I don’t have to hoard it all locally. Eventually the day will come when I’ll probably give in and get Apple Music and most likely keep everything else in place.