#2014BloggerChallenge: What Happened to CDs?

To this day I still have a CD player. And I still use it. Every morning the alarm on it wakes me up to whatever tune I set it to. I know most of us still have one in our car, but in all honesty, CD players are getting pretty outdated. I mean who needs CD players when we have satellite radio, Bluetooth connectors, phones, iPods and iTunes?

All these things have contributed to the first world's issues with not waiting our turn and in my opinion, being control freaks. Everything is always right at our fingertips, all the time and we always have control over every little thing in our lives. I really believe that these things were all brought on by technology.

Think about it. You put your iPod or phone on shuffle and if a song you don't like comes on. You pick your phone up, which is probably sitting beside you and change the song. Not that you couldn't do that with CD players, but you would have to take your eyes off the road or walk across the room. These days we have phones on us every hour of the day or have fancy buttons on our steering wheels to change the song.

So what do CDs and music have to do this? Back before iEverything and other gizmos we put up with that song on the CD that we didn't necessarily like whereas today we just don't buy the song. This puts a lot of pressure on musical artists today because they can be so easily judged from one random 30 second sample you heard on iTunes. CDs gave artists more room to express themselves and develop the character of the album. For example, the lastest Paramore album Paramore has a very unique character. I know, because I bought the CD. There are many little 1 minute interlude diddies on this album. When I would listen to this CD and would just listen along to the interludes and I quite enjoyed them. Now that I listen to this album on my iPod more than I do the CD, I actually make an effort to skip the little interludes because they don't fit an actual track, in my mind. They fit a little break in the album and that's really the only place for them. As well artists and their producers can spend hours contemplating the order of songs, the artwork and the words on the album, which ends up only to be put on shuffle, skipped, overlooked and unseen by the iTunes buyer. Artists can do a lot of cool things when you give them an hour or so of your time to listen to their creativity in all aspects of their album. But they can impress you very little in 30 seconds or 3 minutes (depending whether you actually have the heart to buy it or not).

So throw on a CD next time you're on a long drive and let another person's creativity inspire you.

By the way this was the latest #2014BloggerChallenge where are topic was music. 

What are some of your favourite albums/CDs?