How I listen to music has changed over the years. When I was a kid I listened to AM radio then FM radio and records of course, from the stack of old classical 78 rpm records my parents had, to 45's and eventually to an extensive collection of several hundred LP albums. I missed out on the age of 8 track tapes because that was such a short period of time and I didn't have any money then. I had many cassette tapes, mostly recorded from my LPs. I listened to the records on a number of record players or "stereos" as we called them back then. Cassettes were perfect for the "Walkman" that I used for several years. I listened to radio on the stereo and on a black plastic mono transistor radio, so very high tech! :-) 
My vinyl album collection vanished in two waves, the first in the mid 70's when I heard a fire and brimstone preacher at Evergreen Christian Center in Olympia Washington preaching about how evil they were and how you couldn't be a Christian and listen to rock and roll. (Please visualize me rolling my eyes now, thank you.) I tossed dozens of now classic rock albums into the dumpster at the apartment I was at, and watched as kids from the complex jumped in after them and took them home. Made them happy at least :-) Later I accumulated even more evil rock and roll, once I realized what a load of rubbish those money grubbing lying fundamentalists were shoveling. I lost that collection when my ex-wife confiscated them during our divorce :-( My cassette collection I took with me but the age of the CD came along and I eventually donated all of the cassettes to my daughter after noticing that I hadn't had a tape player for some years and they were just gathering dust. I still have hundreds of CDs. I never listen to them though. I burned all of them to MP3s so I could listen to them on my computer or on MP3 CDs on a special combination CD/MP3 player and later on my iPod. About this time came a period of downloading MP3s from Usenet and from various pay services, many thousands of tracks eventually. I never listen to them anymore either, not even on the iPod or my Blackberry which I briefly used for that purpose. These days I see no reason at all to "own" music because of the easy availability of customized streaming music stations such as Pandora or Slacker Radio. Both have free and pay versions, I use only the free versions. I'm sure there are others out there as well but these two are my favorites and of the two Slacker is the best in my opinion. Slacker allows me to "cache" stations on my Blackberry so that I can listen even if I am out of signal reach for a while. Both let you set up stations that only play music you like, many different stations for different moods. I can plug my Blackberry into my TV or into another Stereo to listen without headphones and the quality is good enough for me, I'm no audiophile anyway. There is so much music, similar to stuff I like but that I never heard of before, that I have been able to enjoy since these services started that I no longer use my huge music collection at all... except in the car where I sometimes plug in my old iPod to the CD player or put in MP3 discs or even listen to the radio on some occasions. Of course this is only because I haven't figured out how to get my Blackberry hooked up to the car, once I can do that I will no longer use any of those I'm sure.
My vinyl album collection vanished in two waves, the first in the mid 70's when I heard a fire and brimstone preacher at Evergreen Christian Center in Olympia Washington preaching about how evil they were and how you couldn't be a Christian and listen to rock and roll. (Please visualize me rolling my eyes now, thank you.) I tossed dozens of now classic rock albums into the dumpster at the apartment I was at, and watched as kids from the complex jumped in after them and took them home. Made them happy at least :-) Later I accumulated even more evil rock and roll, once I realized what a load of rubbish those money grubbing lying fundamentalists were shoveling. I lost that collection when my ex-wife confiscated them during our divorce :-( My cassette collection I took with me but the age of the CD came along and I eventually donated all of the cassettes to my daughter after noticing that I hadn't had a tape player for some years and they were just gathering dust. I still have hundreds of CDs. I never listen to them though. I burned all of them to MP3s so I could listen to them on my computer or on MP3 CDs on a special combination CD/MP3 player and later on my iPod. About this time came a period of downloading MP3s from Usenet and from various pay services, many thousands of tracks eventually. I never listen to them anymore either, not even on the iPod or my Blackberry which I briefly used for that purpose. These days I see no reason at all to "own" music because of the easy availability of customized streaming music stations such as Pandora or Slacker Radio. Both have free and pay versions, I use only the free versions. I'm sure there are others out there as well but these two are my favorites and of the two Slacker is the best in my opinion. Slacker allows me to "cache" stations on my Blackberry so that I can listen even if I am out of signal reach for a while. Both let you set up stations that only play music you like, many different stations for different moods. I can plug my Blackberry into my TV or into another Stereo to listen without headphones and the quality is good enough for me, I'm no audiophile anyway. There is so much music, similar to stuff I like but that I never heard of before, that I have been able to enjoy since these services started that I no longer use my huge music collection at all... except in the car where I sometimes plug in my old iPod to the CD player or put in MP3 discs or even listen to the radio on some occasions. Of course this is only because I haven't figured out how to get my Blackberry hooked up to the car, once I can do that I will no longer use any of those I'm sure.
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