What does all this mean for music and culture? Music has been increasingly miniaturized and made more portable in recent decades. It has also dematerialized. The preferred form is the MP3, which is a cluster of data stored in various devices. Now the link of the medium and the music is gone. For many years, album art and liner was as significant as the music. CDs retained this to some extent, but on a smaller scale. With MP3 files, there is no container for the music. It just in--somewhere in cyberspace.
Further, music becomes more de-contextualized. The play listreplaces the order of pieces on a recording. We shuffle on through. The idea of a concept album--a coherent body of work establishing and developing a set theme--is nearly dead. (In 2007, Neal Morse created a concept album based on the struggles of Martin Luther, but this is now very rare.)
I am reluctant to go the way of the iPod. I do not favordematerialization, however economically expedient. I cannot bring myself to think of dematerialized books at the moment.
Nice blog. I'm a lover of jazz too, listening right now to Coltrane live in Stuttgart (1963). But I have gone over entirely to MP3 files and e-books. The drop in cost for older recordings is incredible -- I bought the complete five hours of Louis Armstrong recordings from 1925-1930 for about $8. As for books, I can now walk around with a library on my hip. Yes, the techonology changes things. The sound is not the same as vinyl. Liner notes and concept albums are rarer -- though neither is gone (for many albums, you can also download the liner notes on iTunes). But the trade off is, from my point of view, worth it. The sound quality on 1930s recordings, or on live recordings from the 1960s, or acoustic recordings from the 1910s, is "bad" anyway. What MP3 takes away is real, but far more subtle. Anyway, I think the trade off is worth it, and that technology will eventually advance such that less is lost between vinyl and MP3.
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