I miss buying an album and lying on the floor for three days and going over it with a magnifying glass. I still go to the record store and spend hours there and buy a big bag of CDs. –Stevie Nicks from a recent interview with Rolling Stone

I think most music lovers over the age of, say, 25 can feel Stevie’s pain. Our readership skews slightly older here, so I think I can say with confidence that my early listening experiences mirrored many of yours — hours spent poring over an album’s artwork (either vinyl or cassette, natch), reading the fine print in the credits, memorizing musicians’ names, looking for hidden meaning in the lyrics. (Or just trying, and failing, to understand them at all.) Each major label had a different feel to me back then — from the cool blues of Reprise’s distinctive cassettes to the cheap, bare-bones packaging of MCA’s titles. While other kids my age were diagramming sentences, watching Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and requesting Bon Jovi on our local Top 40 stations, I was learning names like Joe Chemay, Jeff Bova, and Judd Miller.

And although music was portable back then — I never started my walk to school without my Walkman — it wasn’t the bite-sized commodity it is now; if you bought an album, you were probably going to develop more than a passing acquaintance with its contents, whether or not you liked every song. This happened for two reasons: One, because fast-forwarding through a track was a tedious, inexact process that sometimes took half as long as just listening to the damn song; and two, if you spent $10 to $15 on an album, you tended to feel like you needed to spend a little time with it.

I’ve talked before about how I feel like the advent of the CD sort of destroyed our relationship with music — how the ability to push through a song with a single tap of a button, and let a machine randomize an album’s running order, snapped the first tether between us and any kind of consistently deep emotional response to a song. But that isn’t what this column is about — not really, anyway. Today, I want to talk about where snapping that tether has led us — specifically, to a place where we can carry music with us literally everywhere we go, but really listening to it is damn near impossible.

I know my perspective as a music consumer isn’t totally unique, but I think my progression — from a typical ’80s kid who bought albums sparingly (and listened to them for years on end), to a writer who spent the late ’80s and early ’90s gorging on scads of free music (and discovering much of it wasn’t very good), to a thirtysomething critic with 200,000-odd mp3s in his library and an inability to remember enough favorite albums to fill out the latest Facebook meme — reflects the way our relationship with music has changed, and how our untrammelled access to cheap or free songs and albums has backfired on us, specifically those of us who really love music enough to spend time seeking it out. (more…)