In 2006, my father bought me the Red Hot Chili Peppers' recently released "Stadium Arcadium" CD as a gift, only to have me pronounce with pride at the dinner table that very same night that a friend had emailed me the MP3s a few hours earlier. The culture clash wasn't always pleasant. We existed in spite of iTunes' success because we were still on the right side of the digital music revolution - the one that understood the supply of music could reasonably be infinite. We, the reckless downloaders, saw it as a golden age. In three years time, the company sold its billionth track and iPods were everywhere. Apple's iTunes Store launched the year I received my iPod, with 200,000 songs. But we were less willing to hang on to the past and more open to the possibility of music consumption radically changing in the coming years. They didn't understand, for one, how it was technically possible - like many at the time - but more importantly what it meant for music at large. An even louder death knell for our MP3s? Software like Spotify is grander and cheaper than anything in our wildest imaginings. After all, the streaming apps are still better than stealing music. We knew subscription services were likely the future, even if they utilized somewhat arcane pay scales and were rejected by some musicians, like Radiohead's Thom Yorke (who coincidentally helped orchestrate the beginning of the end of the download era when 2007's "In Rainbows" was released on a pay-what-you-want model). How had so many years of collecting, downloading and cataloging been rendered null? How had an extreme moral ambivalence to the wrongness of piracy - a wanton disregard for anything but having all of the music we could fit on our hard drives - been co-opted and sold back to us for a monthly fee?
These mobile apps were here to stay, and they would be taking our music libraries away - by making them irrelevant. Whether "they" represented tech companies or the music industry, storage constraints on smartphones and the burden of iTunes upkeep was a huge time suck. That was the half-kidding, semiserious conclusion my college friends and I reached a few years ago when we realized subscription streaming services, namely Spotify, were not a fad.
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