U.S. Record Industry Sees Album Sales Sink to Historic Lows (Again)

Great point in the first paragraph, Muckie about artists you have known and owned for years as conversation pieces but never listening to them much. I struggle with this too, the endless push and pull between collector and connoisseur, always battling over what to purchase. As I stated in the past, I was into collecting sports cards for over 25 years and dissolved a large portion of my collection to give my music collection a jump start a decade ago. In that time I have increased the size of my collection tenfold. But, unlike my formative music years, I don't have a 99 percent memorization rate. It's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 70-75 percent. As I get older and have less money and time (wife, house, daughter, lol) I feel as though I will never get back to where I was 20 years ago unless I stop buying anything new and force myself to absorb what I already own.

As far as downloading/ copying goes, I never really got much into file sharing for fear of computer viruses and made dubbed copies on cassette back in HS due to lack of funds. Ha. A few years back, my best bud and I were going to buy a shitload of blank discs and copy what we didn't have from each others collections. He has a lot more variety than me ( almost entirely Hard Rock and Heavy Metal with a focus on the 1980's in my collection) and I would have ended up with 500 more albums I wouldn't be listening to just gathering dust.

N.EX.T - Eternal Winter Suite, Part I: The Last Knights

once upon a time
in the ancient age of digital
vicious evil dragon named Illegal
finally acquired
the magic spell called download
the advent of ugliest creature
in the universe
illegalius downloadus
thus even good people has
turned to the mob
under his erupting power
they used MP3
small but sharp weapon
the world has doomed
all the real musicians
have disappeared

time is running out
the music is dying
the fifth element of the universe
in the end
aero pirates called next is summoned
now they are the last remain
order of musicians
the final journey begins