# How do you listen to your music?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-listen-to-your-music/562849>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [December 3, 2010, 7:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-listen-to-your-music/562849 "2010-12-03T19:48:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\
**Post date:** [December 4, 2010, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-listen-to-your-music/562849/21 "2010-12-04T17:35:10Z")

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I still own lots of physical CDs. Sometimes I listen to the CDs themselves, sometimes I rip them temporarily to my mp3 player, for portability and convenience, and listen to them there and then delete them to make room for more. For the most part I listen to whole albums (or in the case of classical muic, whole symphonies, concertos, etc.) rather than individual songs, but I have been known to rip individual tracks and make myself a shufflable playlist.

Someday, due to space issues, I may have to rip a lot of my music to a hard drive (or DVD-Rs or something like that) and put the CDs themselves in storage somewhere. But I can’t see mayself selling or giving away the CDs. Partly for legal and ethical reasons—if I no longer own the CDs, my legal and ethical right to possess the songs is doubtful at best. Partly because I’d be afraid of losing all my music in a hard drive failure or something like that. Partly because I like the “documentation” that comes with the CD (the lyrics, credits, photos, liner notes, etc.). And partly because, if it’s an album or artist I care about, the CD is a physical Artifact that I want to have on my shelves to show my support.

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**Author:** ![multimediac17](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/839c29/32.png) [@multimediac17](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/multimediac17)\
**Post date:** [December 4, 2010, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-listen-to-your-music/562849/22 "2010-12-04T18:29:19Z")

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> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#):
>
> Partly because I’d be afraid of losing all my music in a hard drive failure or something like that. Partly because I like the “documentation” that comes with the CD (the lyrics, credits, photos, liner notes, etc.). And partly because, if it’s an album or artist I care about, the CD is a physical Artifact that I want to have on my shelves to show my support.

These are all reasons that I too always buy CDs when available (and would never get rid of them/sell them). That first reason scares me - even though I have a digital backup of all my music, that’s never 100% and short of some horrible accident wiping out all my physical media, CDs are much less likely to fail me and are therefore the best backup I can think of.

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