the house closing we thought had already happened…

when i started in the early 80’s, you had your choice of four different mediums…

…and “streaming” was what your piss did back then.

no, your options were cassette, lp, reel to reel, or eight track. i went cassette, and went i did. this was the beginning of my music collection getting ridonkulous, and it never stopped. i split from them, but went back later, and it was down to three mediums then – cassette, lp, or cd. that time i went with the last one. i still own more records than cd’s, but digital exploded for me. i’m not sure how many tracks i have in my apple music, but it’s in the tens of thousands, and that’s not even including my previous iTunes, which somehow doesn’t have any of the hundreds of CD’s i imported, but they still live on an ipod in grey’s center console that also has a five figure library.

long before our wonderful digital age where you can have your phone i.d. a song, then pull it from apple music and drop it in your library (at least, that’s how i do it) the way to bulk your shit up quickly was doing twelve tapes for a penny. then they had you – the original subscription service that locked you the fuck down. forget to send back that postcard opting out of the tape of the month? too bad – now you have it, and owe them about 150% of what your local record store charges for the same thing (which is how they balance out that initial mega shipment). and back then there was no link to click to get out – you had to (at best) call a number and wait on hold, at worst send a postcard that usually guaranteed you one (if not two) more overpriced shipments before you were let out, but you had to fulfill your obligation to a certain amount of shipments before they’d let you out.

sound familiar? this was the O.G. …

so why am i bringing up old shit, you might ask? because it ain’t as old as you think – in less than a month, they stop accepting new orders – so if you still wanna experience the thrill of waiting for a tangible good for weeks in the mail that you coulda downloaded in seconds, your window is closing.

i’m a pretty big music fan but even i read this headline and my mind went to the same place it does when you read about an older actor or musician passing away this week that you honestly thought had died years ago. it’s not quite the same emotional blow and feeling of mourning when you get the death announcement for something that you’d already accepted passed either directly, or just from it fading from memory. apparently it’s peak was the year my mom died, back in 1996. i remember john mark starting a membership and putting the house across the street from where he stayed (which was abandoned) as his address (and some literary character for the name versus his own) and just waiting for the random box to appear on the porch across the street (which they diligently delivered to a house that hadn’t gotten mail in literal decades and was clearly collapsing in on itself and uninhabited) and then just went and got the box after the mail truck left. just like that, twelve new CD’s in the collection.

and you wonder why i thought they’d gone out of business years ago?

but after seventy-one years, apparently it leaves us. and if credit reports didn’t have limits, i guarantee a few of us still owe them money. it is where i got my first zz top tape, and we went two outta three with those guys this last week…