And the music never stops

I happened to glance at my CD rack the other day and realised that I hadn't played any of my CDs for over a year. I remember a time when I was quite proud of my CD collection, and now I can barely remember it exists. The main reason, of course, is the quite dramatic expansion in online music availability over the last few years. It is amazing that access is practically unlimited, at costs approaching zero if you are little inventive and not too hung up on pristine sound quality. I usually either have the streaming grateful dead channel, or my Yahoo customized radio station on. Both are absolutely free, and the latter has an astonishing catalogue. Nor am I plagued with adverts on these. With the Yahoo station, I have a preferred list of artistes (Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Paul Desmond, Louis Armstrong, Modern Jazz Quartet, Milt Jackson, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, you get the drift) and the player throws up random selection from these and similar acts in the genre. Amazing stuff, there is barely any repetition. The best part is, I get to record these off my sound card using a simple piece of software that cost me £20. So now I have a massive mix of miscellaneous setlists for when I am offline. Until last year, I was also subscribing to the MSN music jukebox service. It let me play full albums on demand, at the cost of 1p per track. Actually buying the track cost 30p per, but why would you want to do that when you could play it fo 1p and record off the sound card perfectly legally?! I subscribed and recorded until my hard drive was bursting at the seams!