The evolution of music consumption in my lifetime

I am more than likely the oldest student in Professor Macek's Spring 2015 Introduction to New Media class, at 24 years old I remember a world before internet and even compact discs. I remember going to music stores -- yes, there were once stores for buying music, and music alone -- and buying OutKast's "Aquemini" on cassette at the age of eight. That was the first album I bought with  my own money -- well, I probably didn't actually earn the money since I was just eight years old, but you get the point.

As I look back on those years, I don't really remember the transition from cassette to CDs but when it happened it was clearly no looking back. I had my CD walkman all through my junior high days with a big CD binder in my bookbag along with a 12-pack of batteries. Thankfully Apple came along with an iPod, so I could stop lugging around this bookbag full of CDs and batteries. In 2003, I got my first iPod -- I keep it until 2009. It was an 160 gigabyte iPod classic. Even with my iPod though, I still went and bought CDs -- at least until 2008.

In 2008, I graduated high school and in my first year in college I learned about the many ways to "illegally download" music. From sites like Megaupload, where people around the world would upload full-length albums for everyone to download to torrents (which I still use to this day). Ever since this new discovery, I only buy albums for artists I especially support but when I do buy an album I do so on iTunes.

Despite me moving away from using CDs, I thought they were still getting use, I was mistaken. So, I got my new laptop in the summer of 2014 and I asked the salesperson, "where's the CD drive?" He simply replied, "you don't need it." For some reason, I didn't second-guess him. I bought the computer and in almost a year's time have found no reason to use a CD drive -- not even for software installation.

Between age 11 to age 18 I had a collection over 200 CDs and now at the age of 24, I cannot tell you where 90-percent of those CDs are. I have converted them all to mp3s and they are stored on my external hard drive but I cannot for the life of me find the hard copies.

Even though I have this huge library of music on my external hard drive, I almost never listen to it. When I got my new laptop I tried to import the music onto it but it was estimated to take more than a day, so I picked a couple thousand songs to import and just subscribed to Spotify.

Now I'm a year removed from CDs and completely in love with Spotify, I am very excited to see what music evolves into next.