I Want My MTV, and I Want a Receipt.

I’m not the first one to say that Guns n’ Roses basically failed when it released Chinese Democracy last year. Considering Axl Rose had been putting work into the album for nearly fifteen years, casual fans and diehards alike expected great strides for a group whose Welcome to the Jungle hyped thousands of basketball teams, whose Sweet Child o’ Mine became a staple for guitar players around the world, and whose badboy image sold out tour after tour.

I was feeling fairly down about the new Guns n’ Roses release before I read an article about it being the last of its kind. The author, whose name escapes me, cited Chinese Democracy as the last real CD that music fans would ever get to look forward to. In the rise of digital media, consumers are waiting to hear when tracks are going to be available on iTunes – not when discs are shipping to outlets. The author wrote that people had been awaiting the disc since the mid-90’s and had gotten used to the phrase, “I can’t wait to go pick up the new Guns n’ Roses CD.”

I’m stuck on CDs, myself, but I’ve noticed increasingly that jewel case packaging is being phased off the shelves in exchange for wallet-sized download cards. People aren’t peeling back the plastic as soon as they get in their cars anymore; they’re waiting for the clerk at Target to activate their cards, walking to the in-store Starbucks, grabbing a coffee, and plugging their codes into websites for the albums with free video content.

Even download cards are kind of passé in certain circles. One of my favorite new artists, The Queen Killing Kings, released its debut album just this summer. I emailed the band, excited to send them money and wait for the CD, but someone replied, “Sorry, we’re only releasing it digitally for now. Maybe someday we’ll look into getting a physical release, but here’s the link to our Paypal.”

It’s something that I hadn’t realized was happening until someone pointed it out to me. Sure, as a poor college student I go the free download route a lot of the time, but I didn’t know that the artists were following right behind me with their cash cans out. Radiohead made major news when it released its latest album, In Rainbows, in 2007. The first press of the album was in digital format under a pay-what-you-like condition. It took a while for real copies of the album to hit shelves, and lead singer Thom Yorke said that most fans did indeed pay for what they downloaded ( lord knows I didn’t. ) It was a huge step in some direction for artists in an industry plagued with Metallicas, so offended at fans loving their music enough to download it that they filed multiple individual lawsuits to stop the spread.

But at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I balked at the move – I wanted a disc to hold, liner notes to read through, a case with words behind the CD, an anti-piracy warning in the fine print, font selections, and the whole gamut. I didn’t want to be able to click something and be told, “There; there’s our music.”

I know the trend is to downsize, digitize, and help the green movement along, but I have a hard time knowing that the music I listen to sometimes has never been in a physical form, that not even the artists have had to send out their material and wait for the first pressing to come back.

Friends of mine collect comic books and talk about times they’ve seen or held first editions of their favorites. One day, the “cool kids” will be the ones sitting in circles on their laptops, opening files and saying, “See? I totally downloaded it the first week it came out.”