Steve Jobs is Taking My Money

I appreciate Apple's new "DRM-free music for all!" initiative, I really do. The whole computer-authorization thing was a pain, and I've been availing myself of the opportunity to re-download my purchased music now that songs can be purchased individually.  After my music library as it once existed disappeared during a virus eradication, it's nice to maybe not have to rely on the myriad backup CDs I've accumulated.  Viewing the majority of my purchases in bulk, though, is not encouraging.  I'm beginning to wonder if I have a problem.

I own up to being a media junkie pretty easily.  Loving and hoarding music, books, movies and TV is part of who I am - it informs the academic work that I like to do; it comprises the bulk of what I talk about on this blog.  When I started college four-and-a-half years ago, one of the first things that I did when I was alone with my shiny new laptop and my dorm room's internet connection was download iTunes, having only dreamed up until that point of having the means to amass a vast, legal digital music collection.  I've always been kind of principled about not illegally downloading music, maybe prissily so.  I'm the kind of person who bought CD singles.  Before iTunes, there were a lot of rationalized purchases of full albums for one or two tracks, which is how I ended up with CDs like The Best of the Cowsills.  When I regard my iTunes purchases in retrospect, it's certainly better to have bought them all than to have pirated them.  If I illegally downloaded music, it would be Out Of Control. (The last month or so has taught me this, as apparently it is insanely easy for me to talk myself into a $5 purchase. The answer to "Should I give five dollars and x bytes to this piece of media ?" is invariably "Yes!"  At some point my rampant consumerist tendencies are going to catch up with my not-particularly-lucrative chosen field and things are going downhill. Either that, or my computer will run out of memory.) My hard drive would have so much ridiculous crap on it (that is, more than there already is), I can't even say.

Maybe it's not so bad.  I'm just a little concerned about how many of the purchases I completely do not remember making.  I mean, I give myself a little leeway since it has been nearly five years in total.  Undergrad years can be completely insane.  There are some purchases that I clearly made as part of gifts for my family, though I couldn't pinpoint when if my life depended on it.  It's just the niggling few, the ones that are tracks shared with albums I've owned and enjoyed for a long time, that are inexplicable to me.  For example, the Rushmore soundtrack has become one of my absolute favorite albums, but I don't think that development was an extremely recent one.  So then why/when did I buy "Here Comes My Baby" and "Ooh La La"?  How much of the last five years has devolved into this mystery haze?  Why buy "See Me, Feel Me" if I already had Tommy?  Sometimes viewing oneself and one's habits from a distance is a little troubling.