And therein lies the problem: nobody flips through my music. If I've got a party, I queue up some Thievery Corporation, a couple Buddha Bar discs, some Kruder & Dorfmeister and maybe a little Boards of Canada if I'm feeling like the audience is a little adventurous. No one - no one - is at all interested in flipping through my music collection. Vast swaths of it have never even existed in any format other than digital and it isn't a too-hip-for-words "I listen to bands you've never heard of" it's a brutally-frank "my musical interests are not something you feel like sharing, trust me this is the voice of experience."

- January 1995. Recording 101. Assigned the task of selecting a track that we think exemplifies "great recording" and then explaining why. I give them this:

...and proceed to have my musical tastes mocked by the instructor for ten minutes in front of the entire class.

- August 1998. Rebuilt a goth club from the ground up. Needed to test out the system to see what it would do. Put this in the rig:

...and even as we're shaking ashtrays off the bar, the owners ask if we could please play something else.

- October 2002. Go down to set up a DJ system for a friend. Again, nothing but goth kids. Ring out the system with this:

...and am instructed to kindly hurry up because they're not into "hip hop."

- January 2003. Tell my girlfriend (who listens to folk, if anything) that she's almost perfect, except for her taste in music. She scoffs and replies "I can go down to the grocery store and find music I like. You have to order bizarre screechy things from Germany. I think it's your taste in music that's the problem." (I'll admit it - I laughed heartily)

So that's just it - nobody has ever pawed through my CDs with jealousy or interest. It's one long WTF. Now - my music tastes aren't particularly extreme, or even that weird; I'm probably one of the few people who know the bands bfv starts his weekly music thread with (I've mixed a lot of them). But even amongst that herd, I'm a deviant.

So files are better for me. They allow me to hide my dirty little secrets where nobody need examine them. They permit me to serve up Pablum Lounge Mix #7 year-in, year-out and have people say "this is really cool music - what is it?" without them having to suffer through four minutes of Banco De Gaia before the melody hits.

Look at it this way: if it was pressed on vinyl that means it's mainstream enough that someone was willing to spring for a vinyl pressing. Or that the band was confident enough to press a bunch of records before going on a tour. Or that the fans own little enough music that they can find it all without having to resort to a database.

As discussed on IRC, tonight was "Letter L" night for my music collection. "Bands that start with L" comprise 8GB of music 'round these parts. And I managed to find my long-lost mis-tagged NASA voyager recordings because Tune-Up had misattributed them to "Laserlight Recordings" and hidden them from me forever. And that's the sort of shit that I only find by going through all my music every decade and tuning ID3 tags. If I had to put up with that world on vinyl I'd need a temperature-controlled vault the size of a shipping container. 'cuz I grew up in the desert; I've seen what happens to vinyl when you accidentally leave it on the windowsill.

Do... you listen to five hours of space warbles with any regularity? Do you know anyone who does?

Well, you do now because I can find it again. And I'm okay being the only one, and I'm okay not fetishizing over something that's never been inside a recording studio and most assuredly isn't better on vinyl than CD.

'cuz music isn't social for me. Not even a little tiny bit. So the fact that my 200GB porn folder is, in fact, full of music instead of beaver shots suits me just fine.