I like music, a lot. Nietzsche said:
"Without music, life would be a mistake."Music has helped me get through some tough times, but it also can lead you astray as not every songwriter makes the best decisions in his or her own life. A lot of my heroes or idols are songwriters.
Although I've bought 100's of CDs, tapes, and LPs, even 45s, music today is increasingly digital. I spent a lot of time and effort getting my home stereo to work the way I want. This involves a dedicated music server running iTunes because I'm a Mac guy. I've also taken to using Last.fm and hope to take even greater advantage of that service in the future. I've also been building various music mashups such as my CD Collection Browser.
I've ripped most of the songs in my CD collection but I definitely haven't scrobbled them all. I one day hope to convert some of the analog music sources I have into MP3s or some other digital format. Using the iTunes Music Store I've bought up a number of tracks I used to have on cassette or 45 that I wanted to use on for one of my legendary mixes.
The Internet caused a lot of problems for the music biz, but not from me, I support all the artists I like financially by buying their music, going to their concerts, and even buying their merchandize, particulary concert t-shirts. I've never been a big fan of MySpace, I always thought their HTML especially with various plugins and user chosen colors was abominable and it crashed my browser too many times to count. I prefered Facebook and iLike, so it is ironic that MySpace bought iLike. However as I said before, I'm now giving Last.fm some time and effort, rather than say Apple's Ping which seemed half baked at launch.
Apple isn't all bad, the iPod made mobile music players a must have for much of the world and doubled the size of their company. The iPod begot the iPhone and the iPad. However I really don't listen to music a lot when I'm out and about. I did buy a iPod Shuffle 2 for while I'm at the gym. Remember when I used to go to the gym all the time? What I have embraced is iTunes, I've spent the last couple years creating playlists, including smart playlists, and training the Genius feature. Last.fm has much of that data now thanks to me, but I may go all out and put my music into the cloud someday. However that costs money and I have to do some investment analysis I guess.