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Six or so years ago, I was at the peak of what someone once referred to as my DJ “career.” (I laughed hysterically when they called it that.) At the time I was playing every Thursday and Friday night, and would occasionally tour, records in tow. During this period I was spending around $200 on new records every week. Heady days, those.

I estimate the closet in my home office currently contains over 3,000 pieces of vinyl. The bulk of these are 12” dance singles. Most of the best house music from 2002-2006 is present. There was a time these records meant the world to me. I knew every beat of every track just by glancing at the color of the label. (Actually, I’ve always been terrible at remember song and artist names, so a lot of that music I remember as “the one with the yellow label and pink writing” or “the one with the cherry logo on it.” I used stickers to mark the white labels, including, one time, some hockey stickers. To this day, there is a song I love as much as any I’ve ever heard, and I know it only as “The Dominik Hasek Song.”)

And now I’m about to give away the entire collection. For free. To be melted down. And I’m okay with that. (I’ll note here that there are about 100-150 records in the collection — including some Daft Punk and Gorillaz LPs, a few rare pressings and, oddly, Abbey Road — that I intend to keep.)

What happened to make this sort of behavior acceptable to me? The me from a few years ago would kick present me’s ass. Hard.

I started this blog to write about my love of old-school things in a new-school world, yet here I am declaring that I’m going to allow literally tens-of-thousands-of-dollars worth of records to be destroyed. Records I painstakingly collected and once valued more than anything else I owned. And this is the first fucking post! That feels like a bit of a failure.

But the truth is, music has changed. I don’t mean that in the sense that contemporary pop music isn’t as good as pop music from ten years ago (it never is), but rather in the sense that how we interact with music and what music physically is has radically changed. Quite frankly, music has become mostly worthless.

When I played my last regular show in December of last year, I was DJing entirely from a MacBook, and had been for nearly four years. I was spending substantially less money on music, but getting substantially more of it. I challenged myself to play 50% brand new music every week, and never play any track (with the occasional really fucking rocking exception) for more than four weeks.

My music at home isn’t much different. I boxed up my CD collection (approximately 1,500 discs) long ago. They are sitting in my basement. Instead, the music I listen to is stored on a laptop and an iPod (and is backed up on an external hard drive). I get new music all the time. So much, it’s hard to keep up and there are probably dozens of albums sitting in my iTunes library that I’ve never even listened to.

One thing I can say about music today is that it’s beyond cheap. Sometimes I pay for it. A lot of times I don’t. This isn’t because of some deep-seeded desire to fuck the music industry or anything, it’s just the way it is. (The ethics of that is a discussion for another time. That is, if you’re still into having discussions on the ethics of music piracy in all its various shades of grey, which, I think it’s safe to say, most people really aren’t anymore.)

As Patton Oswalt said (about iPods and not music in general, but I think it still relates), “It’s a miracle and no one cares.” And he’s right. Music has become worthless. Beautiful and I can’t imagine my life without it, but worthless.

I fought the good fight to keep vinyl relevant. I did. But in the end, the cost of digital simply made it impossible not to transition. And this doesn’t even account for the storage and portability problems presented by vinyl, itself a format that originally beat out Edison’s cylinder not because it offered better sound quality (it didn’t) but because it was cheaper and easier. This has always been the direction music was headed in and we’ve simply reached the logical conclusion.

Keeping 3,000 records (dance singles at that) just isn’t practical. My wife and I just bought a house and before we move in those fucking things had to go. (That directive was actually hers, but I fully support it.)

I love the idea of vinyl, and as I said, I’m keeping some of these records. And I’ll probably even grow the collection a bit. I mean, I have Abbey Road, why not get the rest of the Beatles discography? But the reality is vinyl just doesn’t have a place in the world anymore beyond nostalgia. (And, to be perfectly honest, I have more love in my heart for the cassette tape format. Does that date me?)

I suppose that’s the point to this blog. I’m a technology writer and self-identifying early adopter, but I also cling to objects that seem out of sync with modern times for as long as I can. I love Polaroid film and paperback novels and clicky pens. I subscribe to five magazines, which is completely fucking ridiculous. And, once I let a friend melt down the other 2,850, I’ll own 150 pieces of vinyl.

Surely all of this is going to give me some kind of complex.

UPDATE: Mason, the friend who was scheduled to melt my vinyl, won’t actually be melting it. I underestimated his respect for the medium it seems. Still, I’m curious what kind of contraption he will build from it. (And I’m still holding out hope he’ll melt at least one, so as not to make a liar out of me.)