True story: I was running late the other day, trying to get out of the house with my three-year-old son in tow. Somewhere out on the road I realized I didn't have the CD wallet we keep in the car. I was pretty sure I'd brought it out with me from the house and I had a bad feeling I knew exactly where I'd last seen it: sitting on the roof of the car where I'd set it before rushing back to the house to pick up some forgotten item.
By the time I was somewhere where I could safely pull over and take a look it was predictably gone. Its recovery now is beyond a long shot, I have to assume all those CDs, almost 30, are gone. In many cases I don't even have a back-up - I've been lazy about ripping new stuff to iTunes and of the newest CDs tend to get into the car rotation.
As financial losses go it's on par with a medium car repair or perhaps some dental work - the sort of thing that happens pretty regularly, in other words, though I'm finding myself considerably more irked by this somehow. Maybe because replacing what was lost is going to involve considerable work. Going through all the empty cases, figuring what I've got a copy ripped to iTunes for, deciding what to let go, what to burn a fresh copy and leave it at that, what to replace with a new CD.
Quite a different wrinkle in the range of choices there, and it's been making me think about this transition to a standalone-media-optional world. Digital downloads have dominated my music purchases recently, and I haven't been losing any sleep over issues of lower audio quality, lack of packaging or the arguable ephemerality of a digital purchase. But this recent loss has made me realize there is still a pretty sharp line between a digital download and a physical CD in my mind. Where I have (or had) a CD I think of that as the master copy; even if I have MP3s ripped to my hard drive I don't feel like I still have that album: I still have to decide whether I think it essential enough that I'll need to replace it with a new CD.
There are excellent reasons for valuing a CD in the digital download age - not least because when technological development eliminates the need for compression of audio files, anything on CD will allow a free fidelity upgrade. But I have a feeling the distinction I'm making is primarily psychological. I don't feel like digital purchases I've made recently are less of an album than CDs I've bought. But I bought those CDs I lost and mentally, I'm feeling the loss of an object.
I think about loss differently with digital files. To me, psychologically, there is no "original" or "master" copy. The data on my hard drive is regularly reiterated in backups, and total loss of anything that's been backed up, while not impossible, would certainly involve something fairly catastrophic.
The distinctions I'm chewing over are not really practical or technical ones. The interesting inner reality it boils down to is that my purchasing habits have evolved to a new environment but there is still a lot of an old mentality present as far as how I view my music as possessions. It is a distinction I expect to continue eroding until the possession of a physical object becomes genuinely obsolete.
A final thought this whole consideration puts me in mind of is that, while I currently scorn the "subscription" model of digital music (I mean, where you pay for access that you lose when your subscription lapses), I can see a real place for the underlying service model where maintenance of the "master copy" is handled remotely. Already, managing the footprint music occupies on my hardware memory is an issue. I might well find it worth paying for some centralization that could render loss obsolete and provide me with software and statistical tools for managing it all - downgrading the seldom-used to remote maintenance, optimizing the currently popular for distributed access, and so forth. In the current environment it would probably be a legal tangle, and memory, bandwidth and wireless developments will radically change how it all pans out. But I suspect the model of data management as a service will play a big role in the future of music as commerce. The end of physical ownership that could, ironically, render the music one "owns" far less ephemeral than mere disks of plastic - which can disappear with a momentary lapse of attention.
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