Can't Buy Me Love, or an LP, but a Laptop and an MP3 player, now that's a different story

So I've joined the eAge. I splashed out and bought a laptop and an MP3 player on the weekend and now have to find some way of paying for them :-( On the upside I'll now be able to Blog on a regular basis, and on another positive, if I leave the EU within 90 days of the purchase I can claim the Value Added Tax (VAT) back, so I may well take a trip outside the EU for a weekend as I figure the refund will pay for half the trip.

So I spent most of Sunday filling up the laptop with music and have been traveling to work accompanied by most of my (or G's really) favourite sounds. Ahhh life is good, I now look down upon those prehistoric, soon to be extinct species, to which I recently belonged, that still lug around their CD players. Now, if I want to change albums I simple reach into my breast pocket and flick a switch, ahh the joys of technology.

As for the CD, will it go the way of that long forgotten beast, the cassette (does anyone remember those)? Well time will tell, but I think not, in the near future anyway, but this brings me to another point, if the CD does become obsolete we will lose an extremely important non-aural part of music - the cover art. Now, ever since the downturn in vinyl sales this has never really been the same, and for those of you old enough to remember, (or having bought second hand LPs (Long Players, for the ignorant) at bargain prices when their naive owners rushed to be rid of them at the onset of the binary music revolution) I'm sure that you would agree that there really is nothing to compare with the cover art on a Gatefold (or single sleeve) LP, the colour and attention to detail contained within them just doesn't exist anymore, and ahhh that sweet smell.

Now we all know that we shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but really, you could just tell that Houses of the Holy by Led Zeppelin was a masterpiece simply by gazing at the cover, in the same way that you could tell that you should steer well clear of anything with Nana Mouskouri on the cover. What can you do now? The "folder art" in Windows just doesn't give anything away and forgive me for being a bit old fashioned but there's just something about having a "Side 1 and Side 2", to listen to.

And what about getting your album signed in store when you buy it, or at a concert (you'd be hard pressed to get more than two signatures on an iPod Nano), which brings me to my final and most cutting point - does anyone really care anymore? Well maybe if you've read this far you still do, but in a world where a ringtone becomes number one in the charts you are probably one of the few.