Monday, July 13, 2015

Apple Music Hits Home

dr. dre and jimmy iovine at usc $70 million donation 
Thanks to Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre at Apple Music, my music collection just took a big nose dive in value. I'm 62 and starting in my teens, I was always the one building a music collection. I love listening to music and I used to take a battered portable turntable to school and play hit tunes on the back of the CTA bus. Me and my teen aged buddies used to have the whole bus rocking and rolling. This was before the boom box and Walkman era. That was old school.

Does anybody remember Iron Butterfly - In a Gadda Da Vida ? Now you can watch it on YouTube for free (9,708,577 views), but I digress.

I eventually lost my 45's and albums in a fire and after shedding a few tears, I had to eventually move with technology to tape. Yeah, I admit it, for a short time I even had an 8 track collection and then it morphed to cassette tape. That's when I thought I hit a gold mine. I would carry a bag of tapes around with me and pop them into my car or boom box and once again enjoy my music collection wherever I went.

But then CD's came out and my cassette tapes were history. Why wait for a tape to rewind or to memorize the tape location for your favorite song when you could bounce through the tracks of a CD. So here I am again thinking I hit a gold mine AGAIN. I could carry more CD's around than tape and pop them into my newly acquired collection of portable devices. 

And that's when my first iPod killed all of that. I couldn't fathom the possibilities of carrying around my music collection on a little device but as I went from a 2 gig to a 4 gig and eventually to an 80 gig, I hit pay dirt! As long as I had my iPod I could play any song I purchased. Nirvana struck. I was in seventh heaven! Silly me..

And as I aged and kept looking at the stacks of cassettes and CDs in my basement I started to think, who could use them when I'm gone. Who do you give your music collection to? I have CDs that I never bothered to load onto the computer. And I have music I purchased on the computer that no one will ever find. Who wants it? Who needs it? 

My 18 year old daughter hipped me to Apple Music last week. She asked, why would you buy music and download it when you can play any music at anytime for $15 a month? I stood with my mouth open as my chin dropped to the floor and quipped an IDK (LOL).

So now it's finally sinking in. When I want to hear any music from any artist, I don't have to listen to a 60 second sample and buy a track and download it on my iPod and carry it around. I can "rent it" and pull it up on my iPhone right away. And with Bluetooth I can connect into my cars, beats pill speakers, PCs and other devices. And with Apple AAC encoding, the music sounds great!

So I surrender, yet again to the advance of technology. I'm going full digital in the cloud. We bought a family plan so we can all share the same music library on any device. And eventually I'm going to shit can my music collection and any hopes it has some value I can pass on to the next generation. RIP Foxy Brown, Missy Elliott and G Unit. With Apple Music my daughters just got access to more music than I could ever dream of collecting and passing down.

Thanks Jimmy. Thanks Dr. Dre. I'm lovin' it!!


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