The death of the CD

With a heaviness in my heart and tear in my eye, I realised that my love affair with CDs is officially over: my collection is being dispatched to eBay and charity shops. My near complete bundle of Kula Shaker singles has already been posted off to a better life in Germany. Blub!
I've moved so many times, and will probably move from Liverpool in the near future. And dragging around boxes of CDs and books is the heaviest part, so one of them has to go. A lot of my books are annotated (see left for some of them. Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Angela Carter - it's all what you'd expect). With books, you can often revisit them, flick through to re-read that poem or paragraph. But I'm not going to be giving those Mansun b-sides another listen. Ever. I'd prefer to MP3-ise my music and be able to move around, instead of staying in one place surrounded by Bernard Butler and Beth Orton albums.
Sorting through all those plastic boxes stirred a lot of memories. Remember when Tom Jones released that covers album stuffed full of stars of the day, including Cerys Matthews, Natalie Imbruglia and the Divine Comedy? He was like the Mark Ronson of 1999. And what about when Blur's Tender was avant garde because it contains a gospel choir, planks of wood and lyric that makes you think of F. Scott Fitzgerald? And who could forget that fortnight when Catatonia were the Biggest Band on the Planet (or so it felt when you turned on the TV or radio)? Or when that irritating Vodafone advert featuring the Dandy Warhols made it ok for bands to "sell out"?
Memories of record shopping was also stirred up. For a while at university, I had a three-times-a-week Record Collector habit. That shop was too conveniently located between seminar rooms and my student house not to pop in for regular browsing. It's like they jumped out into the pavement and dragged me inside every time I tried to hurry past.
My CD collection isn't vast, I always preferred ritualised browsing to spending money. Most of it is late 90s albums, when I was old enough to catch a train from home in south Shropshire for an afternoon in Hereford. The big city! They had Andy's Records, Our Price and the Dinosaw Market, an old warehouse full of second hand everything. All three are now defunct.
An even bigger record shopping treat when I was a teenager was Tower Records in Birmingham. After hearing Goldfrapp's Utopia on a Q magazine cover mount I HAD TO HAVE the album, but it wasn't going to turn up in the local Woolworths. So I spent weeks convincing my parents to take me to the big, big city of Birmingham where I could buy Felt Mountain. They did, and I loved it.
It's a bit sad that something which once meant so much is now a burden. But it's the music that's important, not the little plastic discs. Isn't it?