Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. The Beatles' Red Album. A flimsy single, Boom! Shake the Room, by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and Now That's What I Call Music! 24. I thought about these treasured objects - my first CDs, bought or gifted to me in the mid-1990s - when I read the other day that CD sales were now enjoying a bounce. I felt pleased at the news of a resurgence, as you might on hearing something nice about an old friend you long ago lost touch with.
It made me think of being 10 years old, newly in possession of a plasticky portable stereo. With a CD player, you could boom and shake your room on infinite repeat. You could digitally programme the Red Album to skip And I Love Her, that buzz kill, and reorder the soundtrack of Grease to prioritise Beauty School Dropout, as heaven surely intended.
I was a child. I wouldn't have known or cared about the bigger-picture changes happening in the music industry in terms of clarity of sound, manufacturing or distribution processes, what the shift towards a digitised, copyable archive of sound would mean in terms of piracy. Back in the 90s, I saw only the enormous new potential for control. I could take a carefully orchestrated album of 11 or 12 tracks and turn it from a multi-course meal into a messy, free-for-all buffet.
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