The Devaluation of Music

Music has devalued over the last few years. I am not talking about the revenue lost to the music publishers due to illegal downloads although I am sure EMI & Co are scurrying around trying to change their business model, I am talking about the value of an album or track to an individual independent of how much or how little the music actually cost them.

Back in the day, I (like lots around me), saved our pennies to scoot down to the record shop and spend our loot on the latest and greatest. We would take it home and with great ceremony spin the disc against the background of parental thumps on the ceiling. Even if we took our precious records over to friends houses we would have to carry loads of records, 8 tracks, tapes, CDs (select appropriate to your age) over to another playing station of some sort. Today, of course, we take the entire kit 'n kaboodle with us. I have an iPhone capable of storing my entire music collection - and that's my point! With the inability to move vast collections of music about that music seemed more precious, had more value to the individual than todays ability to skip through hundreds of tracks listening to the first twenty seconds of a track or clipping the chorus out as a ring tone. Because there is so much of it available the value of it has dropped and maybe that is due in part to the cost in hard earned pennies but I think also because of the availability.

This is not an essay in justifying trying to get back to those earlier times. Would I trade my 14oGB music collection for a stack of records, tapes, CDs etc? Not on your life! But I would argue that music is getting cheaper, I do not hold in reverence that which I held in the past. Maybe that's a good thing, music like everything else evolves.

SiG

Everybodys heard about the Bird..

Derrick Bird is the word and the word on the street is that after being traumatised by some incident in his taxi back in 2007 Derrick held a grudge which has taken three years to manifest into a killing spree! How ridiculous is that? I guess that in stressful times such as these people search for logical explanations for irrational behaviour, but three years after being assulted by someone not paying their fare stretches the imagination a bit far.

Derrick Bird has had some stress although one would imagine it is not too high on the national stress meter considering state of economy and general relationships. Divorce, a family row over a will settlements and hassle at work over rank rights might be enough to hit the bottle but settling disputes with a shotgun is in another league.

To set out to eliminate all your purported adversaries in one go and a load of dissassociated innocents revealed a mind set warped and unconnected with reality. Cumbria along with the rest of Britain is in shock with Derrick Bird's killing spree but whilst we wrestle with the motives for such an attack we must remember that each one of us lives in our own microcosm of reality which can on rare occasions morph into some other nightmare. What keeps pulling us back from dispropotional thoughts of revenge or justice at the junctures of our lives is debatable. For Derrick Bird and his thirteen victims we may never know.

SiG