Once upon a time, collecting music was a clunky experience, to say the least. Vinyl albums (while you might like the sound they provide) are large and take up a lot of space. And though tapes and CDs are smaller, they can add up in terms of storage needs, and none of the above are easy to navigate in terms of finding genres, artists, or songs. Moreover, of course, they cannot really be “shuffled” in a meaningful way.
Nowadays, music can be stored with hardly any storage concerns and can be searched and retrieved almost by magic. I must confess, I am a music junkie. When I open iTunes, I have tens of thousands of my songs at my fingertips. I store my songs on a 750-gigabyte external hard drive, and I can transfer and load up to 15,000 songs on my 160-gigabyte iPod. Not bad, eh?