Lifestyle Contouring

For the longest time, my CD collection was the envy of many a visitor to my home. Invariably, of course, they would say something like: "Do you have any Grateful Dead?" or "How about some Santana?" The completist in me was sent out into the cold, hard world looking for a disc that would fill that hole. Even if there was just the one greatest hits package, I can now say "yes" to both queries. I continued that way for decades, until the volume of plastic that I was lugging around far outweighed the four crates of vinyl that I had been holding onto until I could no longer talk any of my friends into helping me move them from one corner to the next.
My clever wife developed a new storage system in which the plastic jewel cases were taken out of the equation and the disc, artwork, and liner notes were tucked into a simple plastic bag. The CD footprint of our living room was cut in half, with room left for expansion.
That was several years ago. Nowadays the CDs that I purchase are few and far between. The only time my collection sees any growth is when I buy a collector's edition of something or I burn something to a disc for those moments when having that tangible remnant of the physical age of music seems important.
And now I wonder just how important that age really is. Having already jettisoned my albums in a fit of pique resulting from my inability to figure out a clever place to store all those records, let alone find the time to play them on one side and then the other. Even my cassette player would do me the favor of switching over to the other side automatically.
Will my all my music eventually go the way of our family photo albums and eventually find itself plastered on some cloud somewhere? Do I really want to take away the opportunity of poring over those tiny little letters that tell me who played what on this track or that? Not today. I still have to burn the Essential Bob Dylan to disc in order to fill the gap someone pointed out last month.