Musical dinosaurs

(Warning: This post is not about The Rolling Stones or any group reuniting to tour solely for the Almighty Dollar.)

Run down any chart of music sales, and it's easy to see the impact of downloads - top albums rarely crest above 100,000 copies in their release weeks, even industry standards good for a platinum record every time out.

As much as record junkies mourn the sidelining of their medium - I agree that the artwork of records actually meant something, while most CD covers could have been designed in a half hour with a computer and some lousy photos - it's not coming back.

Now, the CD is racing to catch up, with the prominence and iPods and downloading making an CD as valuable as those AOL starter discs that flooded mailboxes in the late 1990s and beyond.

But I still visit the stores on Tuesday, new release day.

This week, it was Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, which I could have easily picked online through Limewire or any other pirate sites. I could have borrowed and burned from a friend, but there are times when owning the actual CD feels proper (Why Modest Mouse? I haven't bought anything in a while, nothing more).

But I don't mess with Limewire, never had a Napster account back in the day, and aside from listening to some MP3s or running through an iTunes gift certificate,
There's really no need for me to download illegally; for the better part of this decade, I've abused the Columbus Metropolitan Library's awesome musical selection and taken hundred of CDS into digital form, let the laptop CD drive spin then spit out a new copy.

Tax dollars pay for it, so why not? That avenue is largely spent now, as I went on a binge after purchasing my laptop, burning everything I'd ever possessed a slight interest in; several scratched-up library discs froze the MacBook, so I've grown a skittish unless it's a new release from the library - people abuse those discs, and I don't understand why (a digression for another time).

Sometimes I even pick up a CD after wearing down a burned copy (There's residual guilt over landing a burn of The Shins' Wincing the Night Away three months before its release and not buying it, but Rolling Stone shoulders that blame, since their write-up of an advanced copy was the signal it lurked somewhere on the Internet).
Wilco's A Ghost is Born and Radiohead's Hail to the Thief both came to my stereo on the same illegal trail, but I eventually bought both.

For now, I'll lumber on, still buying a new record drawing my curiosity.

But downloads are soon to block out the sun, end the age of the compact disc, and usher us dinosaurs off to extinction.