The Sixth Extinction

Technologies change, but human nature? Well...

Earlier this month, Billboard reported that retailer Best Buy will stop selling CDs and will pull them from shelves on July 1, 2018. Other retailers are expected to follow suit.

Wow!  This is the sixth music format to go extinct in my lifetime.

As a kid growing up in the early 1960s, my parents had some old 78 RPM children's songs and Christmas recordings that I played on our RCA record player. "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" and "The ABC Song" were scratchy, but a musical paradise out on the farm.

My older siblings shared some of their 45 RPM hit records. My earliest memories of this format were "Big Girls Down Cry" by The Four Seasons and "Hit the Road Jack" by Ray Charles. I bought 45s into the 1980s, my last purchase being "Man in the Mirror" by Michael Jackson in 1987.

In 1970, I bought my first LP album, then played on our newer stereo console at 33 1/3 RPM, Johnny Cash at San Quentin featuring "Boy Named Sue" (and the explicit lyric "damn"). Many Elton John and Styx LPs followed, but by the late 1970s I was playing 8-track tapes in my car stereo, jamming to Boston and enjoying Billy Joel, though that click on the track change was annoying every time "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" played.

I used high school graduation money to buy my first table top stereo, a Panasonic with AM/FM radio, turntable, and cassette player. What more could a college student want? Now I could record my albums to cassette to play in my newer car stereo. Cassettes also could be searched, fast forwarding and rewinding track by track (no more clicks in the middle of songs -- goodbye unsearchable 8-tracks).

After college graduation dawned the digital age. CDs offered the cleanest sound, but I vowed, "I'm not investing until I can record on them!" Then that ability arrived, and I went digital, too.

Then came MP3s and streaming and subscriptions, while some rediscovered vinyl and nostalgically went back to analog stereo. 

And now CDs are dying out... soon to be extinct like the dodo and great auk, 78s and 8-tracks.

What's an old guy to do with 100+ LPs, 100+ 45s, 100+ CDs, inherited 78s, and assorted clung-to 8-tracks and cassettes?

Being the dinosaur that I am, I'm going to turn them up, baby, and play myself a little bit of rock and roll!