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A little Retail Therapy (or why I still buy CDs)

// April 11th, 2005 // Personal

One of the downsides* to working where I do is that we are based a couple of miles out of the town centre. This means that I very rarely get to spend my lunch hour doing anything interesting.

Today was different.

Today I had to go and inform the wondrous Jersey Telecoms that I had moved (a fact that I informed them of not 4 weeks ago) and to avoid suggesting they stick their mobile service provision up their network but, rather than the 2 hours I was prepared to spend queuing I was in and out in under 10 minutes.

This meant I had a bit of time to spend mooching around HMV looking for music that a) I wanted and b) was in the sale. To that end I was pretty successful. I grabbed a copy of Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, the first Puddle of Mudd album, Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone age (a copy of which I have had in an illicit downloaded form for some time now but if I like it, I buy it) and The Beatles’ Revolver**.

I wiffled this little stash back to my desk and promptly fed the whole lot into iTunes and then onto the MP3 player.

As the last disc finished ripping I quickly checked and discovered that the music I’d just bought was all available online for genuine purchase and download at a considerable saving… So why the hell did I buy it?

Well I have a great many complaints about online music including crappy compression rates and DRM but I could equally have grabbed the CDs off Amazon or eBay for a fraction of the cost. And all this wonderful technology is great but there’s one thing it doesn’t do. It doesn’t satisfy the impulse buyer in me.

Amazon is the worst for that. Even on cool products and expensive games or books it still takes a while for the stuff to get to you. On a day like today where I just wanted to spend a bit of cash for the sake of shopping the transaction is the most important part of the process. So what if the music gets put straight into the computer?

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*well I think it’s a down side … my wallet definitely disagrees!
**For some reason this came up as a quiz question not so long ago – What is the first track on Revolver? Of course I knew the answer but my only copy is an ancient cassette so I figure it was time to re-acquire