Dear Mr Jobs, music is not software.

Or, "why I still have a Minidisc Walkman".

I'm watching Fight Club at the moment on Freeview - looks great so not bothered that it's in the wrong ratio. It had the best electronic film soundtrack of 1999 If I want to just listen to the music, I can go and get the CD I bought and listen to it. If I like it that much I could put the CD on Minidisc using my hi-fi separate recorder and listen to it on the move. Now to be fair, MD finally killed off my tape usage after I'd put everything I wanted on CD-R. However, along came Steve Jobs with the Ipod (yes I know I'm skipping over Napster and filesharing). Cue national music associations suing the heaviest pirates before Peter Gabriel pitched OD2 as a legal download concept and Apple came up with its own refined solution which has won them billions. In the words of a certain comedian, they resolved music piracy "through the medium of dance" in their adverts. (you could argue the toss of whether they were inspired by Intel's bunnymen all day). Whilst it's great that Apple's balance sheet has been improved, I have a big enough job dumping videotape to DVD, without re-ripping my CD collection and wasting space on this new half-terabyte hard disk I bought for video transfers.

So I prefer to stay one generation behind on music players and in an attempt to "feel" it, have stuck to music on solid formats like vinyl, CD and Mindisc. At the same time, I'm buying more CDs and teens are buying more vinyl now that it stopped costing £500 for vinyl to sound as good as CD, seven years ago. If you still want to stay up to date with dance music, you still need a turntable.

So music, whatever the format, is made convenient when digitally sorted. However, you still feel it most intensely, when you go and hear it live. It's natural that CD Buying slowed down in the 90s after the population went out and bought hundreds that they would never listen to again (the sole downside of "eclectic tastes"). Now though, I'm returning to buying CDs - at the price I want to pay. Once again, I picked up that Minidisc recorder secondhand, and it was the top of its range.

I used to make audio compilations all the time but if I can hear 4 hours of dance music per week on the radio, and catch it streamed off the net if I'm not up at 3am when broadcast, I don't want the extra work until I have enough music every couple of years. Compilations are a great bereavement coping mechanism but once you're over the death in question, why bother. Ironically it's never been cheaper to make a compilation of the kind that used to cost me up to £100 in CDs by using none other than...iTunes, where the price would be £8-12. Too late for me.

This blogging's quite addictive...but I'd better eat something.