Hello, and welcome to the first installment in a series of articles observing all things related to the musical past. If you have a suggestion for something you want to see covered in this series, feel free to drop it here.

–Clears throat obnoxiously, unwraps hard candy, and pushes glasses up from tip of nose —

I grew up a 90s kid, which means that most of my music-consuming life has been centered around the compact disc (CD). It’s strange for me to think that there are full grown adults today who have never owned one, but with streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Prime Music offering a nearly endless selection of songs – along with the emergence of numerous high quality digital file types – I can’t really claim that they’re missing out on much. In fact, listening to music is arguably easier and a better experience than it was at any other point in history. Technology has put the world at our fingertips, and that world includes a lot of music.

However, the experience of listening to music is wildly different than it used to be. In 2005, I remember waking up on a Tuesday (which is when new albums used to be released, particularly in the United States) and rushing out to buy Thrice’s Vheissu.  I didn’t have my own car,so I had to bum a ride off my friend who was eager to pick up Franz Ferdinand’s You Could Have It So Much Better, which dropped a few weeks earlier. We drove to an FYE forty minutes away and were pleased to find our respective treasures, each forking over $12.99 of our hard-earned minimum wage dollars. Back then, listening to an artist was more than just a way to spend time – it felt like a true investment.

90s-00s kids know that there was no better feeling than walking into F.Y.E. and seeing that the “new releases” shelf had exactly what you were looking for.

With that investment came trust. If I spent that much money (sometimes more) on an album only to be mightily let down, it altered my entire trajectory with said artist. A case-in-point would be Linkin Park’s Minutes to Midnight, a 2007 release that I was beyond hyped for but that still reverberates as one of my first hugely disappointing purchases. On the other hand, consistency was rewarded with loyal fandom: bands like Jimmy Eat World, Thrice, Yellowcard, and Brand New are among bands that I own every CD for, along with all or most of their EPs. I know obscure facts about them that the average listener doesn’t. I could recite to you their entire history as a band. I’m not saying that passion eludes modern day streaming subscribers (after all, I’m one of them!), but it’s all too easy to dismiss a flawed work and move on to the next hot ticket item. That passion has been redirected to a never-ending pursuit of music, as opposed to living with the consequences of a purchase and wearing that CD out until it was faded/scratched, until you knew every single lyric, and until you had spent enough time with it to witness those initial flaws grow into endearing quirks.

All senses of obligatory commitment aside, CDs were just fun to own. There was something about holding the artwork in your hands that made the music real. CD owners probably remember that the best part of opening a new album (once that impossible-to-penetrate plastic was removed!) was taking out the inside sleeve and seeing how much effort the artist put into the packaging. In some cases, it was little more than the tracklist and a paragraph’s worth of credits. Other times, we were treated to anything from collages of high-res artwork/band pics to unfolding posters. If it was a concept album, sometimes there would be illustrations depicting the story told by the lyrics. Vinyl has in many ways carried this torch (as anyone who ordered mewithoutYou’s [Untitled] collector’s edition can attest to), so at least the visual component to music hasn’t been totally abandoned — although vinyl owns a pretty specialized corner of the music consumption market, whereas CDs were essentially universal and brought joy to everyone.

Remember ripping CDs for your friends and family? Those were(n’t) the days…

Obviously, sharing music has become a whole lot easier. At its simplest, all you need to do is link somebody to Spotify’s free app and watch their life change for the better. If you’re really into music, you can pay to go ad-free. There’s millions of free songs on YouTube. You no longer need to risk a computer virus downloading MP3’s from Limewire. You don’t have to travel to your buddy’s house with a blank CD-R so that they can insert it into their disk drive and burn you a copy. This installment of “Throwback Thursday” was never meant to be a comparison of which era is better for music, because it’s so clearly the current one. However, just as with so many other outdated technologies, there’s a certain charm and nostalgia to be missed. Whether it was driving to five different record stores to find an obscure indie gem or jumping through hoops to share a new album with a classmate, music simply demanded more effort and direct input from its consumers. As with anything, the harder you work for it, the more you tend to appreciate it. Today’s infinitely accessible libraries are a blessing that no music fan should take for granted. However, the pleasure derived from them is fleeting compared to the everlasting bond between a classic CD and its owner.