Remember the good old days, when you could actually touch rare recordings? Photograph: Sarah Lee.
Not everyone will be happy about the recent launch of roughtradedigital.com, the MP3 download arm of London's finest record shop. To see jumbled old Rough Trade giving in to the march of technology is a bit like waking up on Christmas morning to find that your nephew's new RoboRaptor has burst from its wrapping to devour the family dog.
Obviously aware of these misgivings, Rough Trade have taken steps to distinguish their website from the likes of iTunes. Like the physical shop, it has The Wall, The Counter, and The Racks, each with a subtly different purpose. And one piece of old-fashioned thinking especially stands out. "Items on The Wall", they explain, "are often limited by either quantity (e.g. only 500 exclusive downloads) or period of availability (e.g. only being sold for 2 days)." This may be turning into a trend: influential Manchester mail-order site Boomkat.com have also just started selling downloads, and they too promise that certain sought-after tracks will soon disappear.
I applaud the intention. There is something so sterile and homogenous about iTunes - it makes buying music feel like buying holiday insurance. And a record collection packed with rarities loses its appeal when any dilettante can assemble an identical one on his iPod in half an hour. Perhaps Rough Trade and Boomkat can put the thrill of the chase back into music buying.
But the trouble is, the chase feels rather contrived. New or obscure bands can often only press up as many copies of their singles as their overdrafts will allow - hence the persistent fantasy that, while queuing in Rough Trade to buy the new Ellen Allien LP, you might also snatch up, on a whim, the very last copy of the debut seven-inch by some unsigned indie prodigies who will turn out to be the next Franz Ferdinand. But a download shop, by contrast, can keep an MP3 available indefinitely at no cost whatsoever. This artificial scarcity feels like a transparent attempt to generate buzz from nowhere. Data is not the same as vinyl.
And even as a business method, it's hard to take seriously, because neither Rough Trade nor Boomkat use DRM (digital rights management) - in other words, there is no invisible trickery deciding what you can do with your files. Obviously this is marvellous, and a good reason to use them instead of iTunes. But it also means that it's easy to share the MP3s with friends - or, indeed, with strangers. Now, no one who really cares about music will make a habit of downloading tracks illegally for which they have the opportunity to pay a fair price instead. But when those tracks have been yanked off the market for no real reason, even the most virtuous of us might be tempted to fire up a file-sharing program.
Isn't there some way that MP3s can be exciting in their own right, rather than just in imitation of aging formats? Maybe, in the Age of the Playlist, context will be everything: a music-shopping triumph won't be finding one rare single, but instead two or three obscure songs that complement each other perfectly and unexpectedly. That will keep us interested until the time when music comes in pill form.
