[petercooper]

And now, if I want to check out a friend's music taste, I just look at their iTunes. I'm not old enough to know whether it's quite the same, but I'm not sentimental enough to think we haven't made massive improvements.

In some circumstances, you can even go a step further now. I stopped buying music about a year ago when I got a Spotify account and now 80-90% of my listening is through that.

I realized that most of my listening is to new/ephemeral stuff rather than stuff I want to listen to for years in which case, I'll just buy those albums if/when Spotify takes a dive.