Old Records Never Die by Eric Spitznagel

her home and meant there was less room for other things. Also—and this was the point that made the veins on her neck start to throb—having things when you didn’t need those things was madness. We already had music. We had all the music we’d ever need—everything we’d ever owned or listened to—and it didn’t require having enough room in a closet. It was in a cloud.
    This is where she lost me.
    I don’t understand clouds. “It protects all of your music,” she told me, not for the first time. Not by a long shot. “You don’t have to worry about crashing and losing everything.”
    Crashing. I was never what you’d call a technophile when it came to record players—I don’t know a damn thing about frequency extension or tonal correctness or the best way to reduce relative distortion during playback—but I know that a record player, any record player, would never do something as apocalyptic as “crashing.” 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 couldn’t 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.
    â€œSo all my old music just disappears?” I asked him, my voice hitting a panicky treble.
    â€œNo, no, no,” Glenn assured me. “They just store an identical version in iCloud, but it’s got a better sound quality.”
    â€œWhat about album art?” I asked.
    â€œAll your metadata is transferred to the new audio files. Everything.”
    â€œWhat if, say, my cover art for Tom Waits’s
Swordfishtrombones
is the Japanese import with a record-store sticker on the front written in kanji symbols? Will that be transferred too?”
    This gave him pause. “Is that important to you?”
    It most certainly was.
    â€œAnd what about genres?” I asked. “Are my files going to revert back to those boring iTunes genres, or do I get to keep my own grouping system?”
    I’d put a lot of effort into coming up with more descriptive genres than iTunes provides. “Alternative & punk” and “rock” doesn’t tell me anything meaningful about my music. So I’ve organized my MP3s into categories like “androgynous pop-rock” and “mildly annoying baby boomers” and “indie rock that I’m marginally interested in” and “alt-country songs about booze, sad sex, and Jesus.”
    â€œI’m pretty sure you could keep that stuff,” Glenn told me unconvincingly.
    â€œSo if iTunes classifies a song as ‘folk,’ they’ll let me change it to ‘nasally musicians I adore unconditionally’?”
    â€œI suppose so, sure.”
    â€œAnd even if they want something to be ‘blues,’ I can insist on calling it ‘white guys playing the blues that seemed more interesting when I was smoking pot in high school’?”
    â€œI really don’t know for sure. Why do you even care about this stuff? As long as the music sounds good, who cares how it’s labeled?”
    I cared. I’d spent days—literally twenty-four-hour days—obsessing 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 “unironic working-class anthems” or “Springsteeny.” If iTunes Match erased