Is the Digital Music Revolution a Good Thing?

There are many reasons to appreciate the move toward digital music, of course. One of the first reasons to spring to mind is storage capacity. No more taking up a wall of space for your album collection when you can hold infinitely more music on a disc drive of one sort or another. In concert with that is portability. If you're going on a trip you can literally bring every piece of music you own with you. Try doing that with vinyl. And, let's not forget the advantages of cataloguing. As anyone who has ever watched the movie Diner can tell you, nothing is more irritating than a misplaced record. Some other things about digital music that spring to mind as preferable over the older format is accessibility. With just the slightest outpouring of effort, you can pretty easily locate just about any recording. As long as it's been digitized by somebody, of course. I spent over a decade trying to track down a copy of a song called "Kinetic" by Hillary before finally lucking upon it on a compilation album. There have been any number of other songs or albums that I had no luck finding. Until the internet came along, that is. And in concert with that is another advantage that is a subject of contention. Not only can one track down rare recordings, but often one can get them for free. Not that I'm advocating "illegal" downloading, but it's there.