her home and meant there was less room for other things. Alsoâand this was the point that made the veins on her neck start to throbâhaving things when you didnât need those things was madness. We already had music. We had all the music weâd ever needâeverything weâd ever owned or listened toâand it didnât require having enough room in a closet. It was in a cloud.
This is where she lost me.
I donât understand clouds. âIt protects all of your music,â she told me, not for the first time. Not by a long shot. âYou donât have to worry about crashing and losing everything.â
Crashing. I was never what youâd call a technophile when it came to record playersâI donât know a damn thing about frequency extension or tonal correctness or the best way to reduce relative distortion during playbackâbut I know that a record player, any record player, would never do something as apocalyptic as âcrashing.â Nothing could happen to a record player that would cause everything you owned, every piece of music, to just be . . . gone.
Which is kind of ironic, if you think about it. Because all those records that couldnât be destroyed, that I could play forever on even the shittiest of record players, which were virtually indestructible, all of those records were now just . . . gone.
When I was briefly, unwisely, considering handing over all evidence of my music to an ethereal, intangible lockbox that exists only in theory, I called Glenn, an old friend who knows his way around computers. I just needed some guidance, or maybe some reassurance.
âSo all my old music just disappears?â I asked him, my voice hitting a panicky treble.
âNo, no, no,â Glenn assured me. âThey just store an identical version in iCloud, but itâs got a better sound quality.â
âWhat about album art?â I asked.
âAll your metadata is transferred to the new audio files. Everything.â
âWhat if, say, my cover art for Tom Waitsâs
Swordfishtrombones
is the Japanese import with a record-store sticker on the front written in kanji symbols? Will that be transferred too?â
This gave him pause. âIs that important to you?â
It most certainly was.
âAnd what about genres?â I asked. âAre my files going to revert back to those boring iTunes genres, or do I get to keep my own grouping system?â
Iâd put a lot of effort into coming up with more descriptive genres than iTunes provides. âAlternative & punkâ and ârockâ doesnât tell me anything meaningful about my music. So Iâve organized my MP3s into categories like âandrogynous pop-rockâ and âmildly annoying baby boomersâ and âindie rock that Iâm marginally interested inâ and âalt-country songs about booze, sad sex, and Jesus.â
âIâm pretty sure you could keep that stuff,â Glenn told me unconvincingly.
âSo if iTunes classifies a song as âfolk,â theyâll let me change it to ânasally musicians I adore unconditionallyâ?â
âI suppose so, sure.â
âAnd even if they want something to be âblues,â I can insist on calling it âwhite guys playing the blues that seemed more interesting when I was smoking pot in high schoolâ?â
âI really donât know for sure. Why do you even care about this stuff? As long as the music sounds good, who cares how itâs labeled?â
I cared. Iâd spent daysâliterally twenty-four-hour daysâobsessing over this stuff, scouring the Internet for the perfect cover art, a reproduction of a water-damaged vinyl sleeve with the Tower Records price tag still in the upper corner, or trying to decide if the Gaslight Anthem qualifies as âunironic working-class anthemsâ or âSpringsteeny.â If iTunes Match erased
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