I'm currently looking through Insound, trying to find things to buy and shifting between two poles. The first pole is thinking that I have the money and I would like to support Insound, the bands I like, and the physical music industry in general. The second pole is thinking, what am I, a capitalist cheerleader?

I feel nostalgic for the early years of this decade, when I spent hours every day downloading music, renaming the files and putting them in neatly ordered folders, driving to Sound Garden in Baltimore and buying a hundred dollars of CDs, alphabetizing the new purchases on my shelf, setting up a record player in my room and moving up half my parents' old LP collection, adding new LP purchases, finding bands to shop for, asking friends what I should buy, looking at all the album art and reading band interviews and dreaming of product . . . and sometimes listening to it, too.

But even the nostalgia is compromised by thoughts of how silly it all is. I look back on it and it now seems to me that I was trying to break through the album covers and into a fantasy world, a place where the music of the spheres was "I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One" and the shifting landscape took on the shapes of indie album art, populated by sixties rockers in their youth who lounged in the fuzzy pastel-green hills and climbed the rotating, swirly discs of color.

I don't ever feel like I'm in this world anymore. I think I'd still want to live in it, but I know that if I ever get there it won't be through buying lots of records.

In the early days of music downloads, I only got albums rather than just the songs I knew, and I burned everything onto CD. I even made cases, getting blank CD cases from Office Depot, downloading the album art and printing it out or making my own covers if art wasn't available. I would listen to music at the computer too, but if I wanted to play it in my room, I needed it on CD.

It was only much later that I got a digital music player, and I brought it to work with me every day, but I also brought a CD player and switched between the two.

For my freshman year of college, I bought a large CD tower and I brought every CD I owned into my dorm room, along with a large CD book full of burned discs, having finally decided that I decided could do without CD cases for most of my burned albums. My collection had grown by Sophomore year, but because of limited space I went without cases and just used the book. Then I took a year off from school and lived in Los Angeles, with few possessions at first but, even though I had no income, a steadily growing music collection. For Junior year I took a move that was radical for me, bringing no music players to Santa Fe but a turntable, a portable Discman and a pair of head phones. As a result, I almost never listened to music in my room even though I kept buying a bunch of CDs online almost every month.

Skipping ahead to my move to Santa Fe in 2006, even though I knew I would be living there for a long time and almost certainly never moving back in with my parents, I left most of my CDs behind in Maryland to save space in the car. I had an 80 GB iPod, and Anne had another 20 GB or so I could fill on her laptop, and so finally in 2006, almost a decade after I became aware of mp3s, I went mostly digital. With vinyl. It's apparently a very common combination these days for people who identify as music fans--CDs are mostly pointless when digital music is so easy to get and listen to and carry around, but people are unwilling to cut ties to music in physical form, or perhaps even just a representation of music in its physical form.

And I'm somewhat there with them, but that part of myself is currently losing the argument with what I guess is a saner and wiser Greg who says, "screw you, hipster. Go find a crumbling urban loft with bad central heating to worship your physical representation of music in."

Not that I have anything against following that hypnotizing vinyl with your eyes as it spins on its metal axis until you feel like you've stepped inside the music like it was some pulsing fun house, holding your breath as it coils and coils, tick tick tick up the big roller coaster climb, so high you can see the ocean from up there, and hey, so that's what the world looks like from outside the atmosphere! And then the release finally comes, your and it breaks your heart with joy.

And also, if there weren't such a thing as album covers, a dimension of band identity would be lost, illustrators would have one fewer way to build a reputation and sell their art, and people like Anne would have no way of choosing music to listen to when browsing a store*. And still, after all these years, I have almost never fallen in love with a band and added them to the music library in my head just by downloading their songs. (Here's to The Bees--known as Band of Bees in the U.S.--for being the first and so far the only one.)

There's another reason I still feel like buying music as well, which is that there's a difference between getting a CD put out by Sony or BMG or Colombia, and buying it from a band, an independent label, or Insound. If I ever put out a book or an album or whatever other physical result of creative effort, I know I'd want people to buy it. I want a world in which artists don't need day jobs, as long as they can find an audience who likes them; I want a world in which people who spend all their time thinking about music can make a living selling it; and in the modern capitalist system, the only way that can happen is if people buy recordings and band merchandise, and go to shows.

But at the same time, I also want a world in which everybody has access to health care, education is extremely well-funded or free, nations aren't divided between masters on the one hand and the slave-producing societies on the other, and nobody gets killed for money, ideology, drugs, or prestige. Buying music isn't going to accomplish any of those things. It isn't even going to get me to my bougie world between the grooves. So I think I'll trim down that Insound shopping cart, or even sit on it for a while.

*I'm not making fun of this practice. Honestly. It is kind of an interesting phenomenon, though, and it probably has something to say about the physical representation of music.