That may be so, but what’s rationality got to do with loving music? Surely it’s about emotion, not reason.

And you’re spot on about discoverability too. I’ve got a couple of fairly well-functioning methods of finding new music through the internet, but they are only good for finding new music. All of the current recommendation systems that I’ve seen completely ignore that there are decades of old stuff out there that might be perfect for me right now.

This might be a whole different thing, but I was talking with a friend of mine, an artist, who is going back to do her Masters soon. She’s totally confident in her own work, and very good, but she’s terrified of having to write huge complex conceptual essays that justify her work. And to me that’s just totally wrong! She should be an artist doing her own thing by expressing herself the way she knows how, not an artist that feels like she has to explain her work in a way that is acceptable to someone else. What I mean is, why should we expect artists to be two different things? A painter can just be a painter, not a painter and critical essayist. And musicians can just be musicians, and I don’t see why aesthetics or physical objects should have to come into it. Because like I said, dealing with all that stuff has kind of distracted me from the actual music in the past, and I became more of a collector than a listener.

Anyway, that’s not really what we were talking about, but it just popped into my head.

But then I suppose I have a particularly intense relationship with the music I listen to, more so than anyone else I know. If I can have the whole package — music, artwork and all — I will take it, because there’s a certain level of completeness there that’s lost if you only have the songs (I’ll admit this isn’t the case in general).

But if I can only have the music, I’m happy to have that too (when the music is rare, it’s more than likely that digital is the only format I can get it in, anyway).