If you are old enough to remember the way music used to be, you no doubt remember the cultural tradition of going to record stores — those somewhat shady places that always seemed to make money but never seemed to be very crowded, that were always staffed by people who were either in bands or had an encyclopedic knowledge of all things musical; for example, if Mick Jagger had had a dog back in 1970, these people would probably know the dog’s name, gender and breed. Back in those days, it was not uncommon in the slightest to buy a CD which typically had 10 to 12 tracks on it for $18 or so. After all, what else could you do? There was pretty much no other way to get your music when you wanted it, unless you wanted to wait until the radio was playing a song you liked and record it straight off of there (which could have taken an awfully long time).
But then a very strange thing happened back in the mid 1990s — a new type of file was born known as the MP3. At first, rather like the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the people of the world were not certain what to do with these strange files. The Internet was still young, and there was no Google to ask questions of, so figuring out this quandary was best left to the technorati (otherwise known as nerds).
However, over time the world finally caught on to the fact that the MP3 allowed them to download, burn and share all of their music. While they had previously been forced to pay a large amount of money to have this music close at hand and available for their personal enjoyment all of the time, the MP3 let them have it inexpensively and share it freely. Now, music devices can easily hold hundreds (or even thousands) of songs apiece.