That magic touch

“Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, ‘Listen, mate, life has surface noise.’” — 1967-2004 BBC Radio1 disk jockey John Peel (1939-2004)

Amid all the doom and gloom of the headlines recently, I found one nugget of good news that heartened my heart this week — the heart I wear on my sleeve for all things old school, that is.

Into this modern ethereal era of streaming online music media, dear audiophiles, comes news that more and more folks are rediscovering the magic of physical media, which is making a retro nostalgic comeback.

While — spoiler alert! — music cassettes and eight-track tapes have long passed into history along with shellacked 78s, AM transistor radios, in-car eight-track players, and fuzzy dice rear-view mirror danglers, vinyl LP record albums and now CDs are on an upswing as people are rediscovering the joys of physical media.

This trend is not new to me. Some of us never stopped collecting physical media. There is nothing cooler than having a personally curated collection of music that you love at your fingertips that you can instantly listen to whenever you feel like it. I will continue to buy physical media for as long as it’s made.

While some folks were wholesale jettisoning their vinyl LPs and 45 singles and later their CDs into the trash or dropping them off en masse at thrift stores as they downloaded and still later streamed their music, I stood back and shook my head, knowing that people were going to feel the mistake that they made.

Being a tinfoil hat outlier, over the decades, I doggedly hung onto my old vinyl records, added still more for more discounted pennies on the dollar, and then branched into CDs, which I also added to my music collection, even as I added a curated collection of favorite tunes downloaded to portable smart devices like my iPhone and now obsolete sixth generation iPod Nano.

After a few brushes with “purchased” selections of downloaded music in my libraries no longer being available on my devices due to copyright issues much larger than I, it was a blessing to have my physical media as a fallback.

With digital, it doesn’t feel like you truly own anything, so while paid downloads may disappear in the corporate-level drama of the music and tech world squabbles playing out over copyrights, physical media endure. Nobody’s going to take it away from me.
Mica Paris isn’t going to come knocking on my door, asking to get her 1988 CD album “So Good” back, nor Starbuck their summer 1976 one-hit-wonder vinyl album “Moonlight Feels Right.” Neil Sedaka isn’t coming to repo his vinyl 45 of “Laughter in the Rain,” nor is multi-platinum country singer Ronnie Milsap coming for his 40 number one hit singles CD. And even though we conveniently live in the same city, Cheap Trick lead guitarist and songwriter Rick Nielsen isn’t gonna ring the doorbell at my condo to confiscate the band’s 1977 “In Color” album, a recent retro find in a groovy, blacklight-heavy vintage vinyl shop.

Meanwhile, streaming services are not always reliable, depending on the quality of the internet service and connection, and what’s available here today may well be gone tomorrow.

And for some of the more obscure stuff, it’s only available in its original physical media format. Good luck finding J. Fred Knobloch’s 1980 one-hit wonder “Why Not Me” on anything but vinyl.

For me, the bottom line of the tug-of-war between physical media and digital downloading and streaming comes down to the question of owning versus renting.

Physical media are real, and I own them. Whenever I want to play something, I love the ability to browse my physical music collection, grab the CD or record I want, and listen to it.

And that’s the way, uh huh, uh huh, I like it.

News-Review freelance columnist Eric Johnson can be reached at eric@fyinorthwoods.com.