Music Experiences You’ll Never Have Again

Little Kate was born to rock.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with music. Seriously, I would wait by the radio for my favourite songs to come on to tape their grainy feed, I would stay overnight at my Grandparent’s house on Friday nights to record the freshest music videos on the Much Music countdown (only to be devastated when they skipped over the videos I wanted to see). I feel like people my age are the last generation of people to know the pains of pre-MP3 music.

           

All of this has been said before and people will complain about it into the future but it really struck me today as I read an article on Buzzfeed titled, ‘35 Music Experiences You’llNever Have Again’. It scared the crap out of me. Though I never want to have kids, I don’t want them to go through life without facing the true pain of being addicted to a song and not having it at your fingertips. I don’t want these conceptual children to be able to listen to a song 20 times a day, the day it is released and kill it for themselves. I want them to pull-up to Zeller’s run to the music section to find that the album they had saved $20 to buy on its release day has sold out and the teenager at the counter has no idea when it will be back in stock.

If you know these pains, you get how torturous these things really are. You know the amazing feeling you could get from a free compilation CD for buying a certain brand of clothing or a magazine during ‘Back to School’ shopping. You get me (at least right now). These lessons in patience don’t happen anymore unfortunately, not only because Zeller’s is no longer a thing, but because we have it all at our fingertips.

I have been musically obsessed since I really caught on to the world outside of country music, the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys introduced me to pop music and recording cassette tapes in the second grade. In forth grade it was music videos (thank you Britney Spears). Grade seven brought music downloads and burning CDs. Grade ten was the year of the MP3 player and in grade eleven I became the first person in my school to have an iPod. It really is not surprising that I ended up listening to music and talking about it professionally.

As much as I complain, I am part of the problem. I still buy music, in fact I have reverted to vinyl once again because I am trendy and it makes me feel classy. I love hunting for vinyl, I hope that feeling of finding the perfect album never goes away. If you could tell young 90s Kate Bruce that at her finger tips she would have a world of music at her disposal 24/7 I hope that you would have blown her mind. Okay, I know you would have blown her mind she lived in a cable/internet free bubble with three TV channels on a good night, she would have had to sit down for that news. I really hope any accidents in my future appreciate the art of music selection not music consumption.