I got them iPod Blues again, Mama

By Eric S. Caruncho, Staff Writer Sunday Inquirer Magazine Being on my third iPod (the 80-gigabyte, fifth generation), it goes without saying that I have finally succumbed to MP3 technology along with the teeming masses. There is something to be said for having all your music at your fingertips. If I get a sudden yen to listen to a particular song again, all I have to do is turn the clickwheel and there it is. Not too long ago, such an urge would have entailed digging through my collection of 1,000 plus CDs or 2,000 plus LPs and 45s and God knows how many cassettes, firing up the stereo system (assuming I actually managed to locate the cut I was looking for), and playing the track. If it was on vinyl, there would first have to be the complex ritual of cleaning the record with my antistatic brush and home-brewed cleaning fluid, cleaning the stylus of my turntable with a different brush, and carefully dropping the needle in the groove with the volume off to avoid any speaker-damaging noise, before turning the amplifier up. Now it's all there in my hard disk, neatly filed into folders and partitions. Acquiring music has also never been easier. To be honest, I haven't bought a CD in years. Why bother when almost all new music is just a download away? Even the most esoteric recordings are surprisingly easy to track down on the Internet, and with a fast connection, it only takes a few hours to download. Now my music library is bigger and broader than ever before. Not only am I more or less up-to-date on the latest indie releases but I have also been able to catch up on music I missed out on from decades past. When I look back at the amount of time and money I spent in the last 20 years hunting down and acquiring music, I just have to shake my head. If I had dedicated the same amount of time and passion to something else, I could have mastered two or three foreign languages, or worked a second job. Now all I have to show for it are shelves of CDs and LPs and tons of stereo equipment gathering dust while I listen to my iPod on headphones. Something's amiss, however. I've never been able to get rid of this nagging feeling that in embracing the convenience of MP3s and music downloads, something has been lost. And I'm not only talking about the superiority of analog over digital music that purists have always held against the admittedly sonically inferior MP3. In making music so easy to acquire, MP3s and downloads have all but eliminated the thrill of the hunt, and maybe that was more than half the fun. Music used to be hard to get. When I first started buying records, an LP cost seven pesos—way out of my league. It took many months of saving up my school allowance before I could purchase my very first album: the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. My second purchase took even longer: it was Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, a double album, which set me back all of P14—a princely sum in those adolescent days. In any case, I only had a few records, which I listened to over and over again, on my father's stereo system, usually at night with headphones, until I literally wore the grooves out. I knew every note Jimi played on "Electric Ladyland", every tape splice in "Sgt. Pepper", by heart. To save money, I would borrow my friends' albums and tape them on my father's reel-to-reel. There were a couple of places in Sta. Mesa Market and Farmer's Market in Cubao that would tape imported LPs for you, and that's how I got into the likes of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Larry Coryell. I would also borrow Thelonious Monk and blues LPs from the old Thomas Jefferson library and tape them. This was the forerunner of music downloading. The music industry even launched a campaign against it: "Home taping is killing music", they cried, successfully lobbying for a tax on blank tapes. Unless you had generous relatives living abroad who would send you records, music was still hard to find in the late '70s and early '80s. I remember scouring the racks at the record section in Unimart in vain for something to buy and found nothing but Styx, Kansas and Reo Speedwagon. Worthwhile releases were few and far between, and the local release of something like Blondie's "Parallel Lines" or the first Joe Jackson album was enough to get my blood pumping. I still relied on borrowing or renting LPs and taping them, however, for my music fix. "A to Z Records,” run by Leslie David and Ces Rodriguez, a couple of congenial music mavens and record hounds, was my haunt. A handful of us music-starved and cash-strapped wretches would rejoice whenever Leslie and Ces managed to get their hands on something choice, like the latest from Japan (the band, not the country), the Cramps, Husker Du or the Smiths. An import LP was something to be cherished, savored and shared, passed from hand to hand, turntable to turntable, its essence imprinted on magnetized oxide particles. The advent of the CD put an end to all that. Many music aficionados found it hard to make the change. The first generation CD players were frightfully expensive, and the CDs themselves were initially costly and hard to get. But as the music industry got behind the new technology, they became somewhat easier to acquire. Being now gainfully employed, I found myself, like so many others, having to buy "Sgt. Pepper" and "Electric Ladyland" all over again, bedazzled by the new medium's crystalline sound and convenience. Even with the opening of Tower Records, however, finding new music was still a challenge, not having unlimited funds. The game was now how to get your hands on that rare import CD without having to pay the ridiculous amount Tower was charging for it. With patience, fortitude and a keen nose, it could still be done. The advent of the CD burner also revolutionized music collecting. Tapes were unwieldy, noisy and sonically inferior to the original LP, but a CD copy was sonically identical to the original. Of course, none of that matters now. Technology has overtaken the CD, and the format appears to be on its last legs—at least as the chief medium for mass marketing music. In only a few years, MP3 music downloads have become the dominant format for distributing new music. The advent of peer-to-peer networks and torrent sites on the Internet has become the bane of the music business and a boon for music hounds, opening a virtual cornucopia of music to anyone with a fast connection. The downside is that finding music is no longer the adventure that it used to be, and without the thrill of the chase, catching the prize often feels like a hollow triumph.