Ha, I read this on the AP wire at work on Wednesday and immediately thought I'd better e-mail it to you, but I was so distraught by wondering if this was happening in my collection that I couldn't function enough to deal with communicating. I gathered from the article that mostly you need to worry only if you have really old CDs -- like from the 80s before it was a popular format -- or if you do really mean things to them, like keep 'em outside.

But yes, scary. Good lord.

... Almost as scary as the thought that some new format will someday completely replace CDs and I'll have to rebuild my music collection again from scratch.

Shudder.

Well, actually, let's face it, there's already a new media that's replaced CDs -- digital file media -- MP3s, AACs, and (God help us all) WMAs.

I've already converted my entire CD collection (LONG AGO!) to MP3s, and my main mechanism for listening to music whether at work, at home, or in the car is my IPOD.

CDs are just a temporary transportation medium from the store to my hard drive, then just a hard-copy backup. And in the case of iTunes Music Store, they're not even that.

The good thing about this media change, though, is that this time it didn't cost us anything. I don't have to rebuy music that I've already bought to switch mediums. Which, IMHO, is how it should be all along. And, btw, why the recording industry is so wrongfully pissed off about it!

Yeah, good point. New formats aren't so bad as long as they don't require expensive rebuying.

And so be it if the free-ness of it screws Best Buy and the major record labels. They've been screwin' us for years! Viva la revolution!