I bought a CD.

When was the last time you bought a CD?

Alright I'll give you some time to think. Rabid fans of *insert popular musician/band here* exempted.

Can't recall? Not surprising really - its the worst kept secret. Fact is, CD sales are tumbling. Remember Sembawang Music? It used to be THE place to go to get the cheapest CDs on sale, compared to inflated prices from the likes of HMV and Tower Records. Where is it now? Gone. Even the gigantic Tower Records has left our shores.

Left standing are HMV, which has since vacated its megastore at the Heeren, and a couple of smaller shops sprinkled over the island like Gramophone and Music Junction. It used to be the fact that in every shopping center you'd find a CD store. Not anymore.

The point is, buying a CD nowadays is a rarity. Nowadays, getting an album means downloading it, legally or illegally, not heading down to HMV and paying 20 plus dollars for a piece of plastic and some paper. Besides, who listens to CDs anyway? Everything fits into that tiny thing in your pocket called the mp3 player. You don't carry boomboxes or discmans around anymore.

And so I am proud to say this - I bought a CD.

Speaking of which, I had to overhaul my CD/DVD drawer just to accommodate the new CD which I just bought recently, Ayumi Hamasaki's Rock 'n' Roll Circus. It was full to the brim when I opened it to slot in the new addition. I had to migrate the DVDs into another drawer, clearing a ton of junk from that drawer in the process. And that was just the Japanese section of my music collection. The remnants of my English/Mandarin listening days are stuffed into another corner. I'm running out of storage space.

Here's the part where I stop and think about how convenient it is to store hundreds and thousands of CDs worth of music into a single hard drive.

+1 to the growing list of reasons "Why we stop buying CDs"

So why did I buy a CD?

The only reason I can think of is this - musicians depend on CDs to make money, so they can use that money to make good music which we listen to and appreciate. CDs are the holy grail to all musicians, especially to the newbies hoping to strike it big. Its a common consensus - the day you make it is the day you release a CD. Not a playlist of Youtube videos nor a digital album distributed over the Internet. Its the physical, piece-of-plastic in a jewel case CD.

I always say this - if you support the artist, buy their CDs, as long as they're within reach and within financial means. I'm lucky enough that stores here actually stock some of the more popular Japanese artistes (overseas versions at reasonable prices, not those crazy imported ones in HMV), although I do wish more were available.

Without people to listen to their music, buy their CDs or cheer them on, musicians are as good as nothing. So take heart, fellow music lover; somewhere, out there, with every CD you buy, with every song that plays on your mp3 player, you are being appreciated.

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Before this Internet age, can you remember the feeling of buying a CD of your favourite artist from the store? The feeling of opening the cover, looking through the included booklet, sitting back and listening to songs you've been looking forward to listening to?

I still get that same feeling each time. And that, is the reason why I buy CDs. Sure, I admit to a bit of fanboyism, but hey, at least I have a reason for it.

This post was supposed to be an album review, but uh, guess I got a "little" bit sidetracked :P