This, I suspect, causes fits in the festering bowels of Clear Channel headquarters, with their massive library of 23 songs (not including Christmas novelty songs). Red alerts are going off, sirens are wailing, inquiries are being made - this can't be! Focus groups overwhelmingly indicated that nobody wants anything other than Nickelback. Heads will roll!

Yeah well, maybe not, but you see what I'm driving at.

And, to complete the story, when the time comes to buy, you can get perfectly good used CDs at Amazon, or my favorite, Half.com for a mere pittance (plus media rate shipping). There's only the "for promotional use only, not for resale" stamp and the knowledge that the seller has probably already ripped a copy to rationalize away.

Now, you young'ns who have the blessings of unlimited University-provided bandwidth and enough peer-to-peer file-sharing options to stay ahead of the RIAA men in black cannot possibly have the slightest conception of how much better this is than life back in the day.

Back then, when we weren't walking to school barefoot in the snow, music purchases went something like this.

You hated the radio as much then as you do now - same reasons. You occasionally might get a clue of potentially good music from a review in a print publication like Rolling Stone, provided that after placing the recording in its proper socio-political context there was any space left to describe the music.

If you were lucky, you'd be in range of a college radio station where you might once in while hear something new and interesting. Then you'd have to wait a half hour for the DJ to finish spinning whatever random tracks he pulled out of his arse to hear the artist and song title. And that didn't usually work because of the vast quantities psychotropic chemicals college DJs are apparently required to imbibe before their shifts. Sometimes all you'd get was, "Wow, everything just went paisley, man."

Even if you were able to identify an artist and recording, you couldn't find the record anywhere. The most comprehensive record store in at the time was a chain called Harmony House (are they still around?) that had a policy of hiring employees so smarmy they would make the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons Employee of the Month. In spite of this snotty attitude, their selection was about the same as you can get at Best Buy today.