..:: Written .:. Off ::..

My first musical disaster happened a long time ago while I was living with my parents. I woke up to find that my basement had flooded, ruining over 200+ albums that I had accumulated. All of my original Yes, Genesis, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Alice Copper were gone. Not to mention a load of others that were out of print.

I still lament over the loss of my record collection. Even back then, it would have cost me thousands to replace them. When I lost my records, CDs were already available. I ended up replacing all of my vinyl on CD.

This past weekend, I suffered another music disaster. My hard drive, containing no less than 12000 songs. At first, I didn’t panic. Most of the songs on that drive were copied from my CD collection, which remains intact. Still, there were still several albums that I purchased from iTunes that were lost on the drive.

I still remained calm. I have some of those albums backed up on CD and the rest were on my iPod. There are programs that allow you to pull files from your iPod and load them back to your computer.

One thing of note, Apple does NOT allow you to re-download your music. You download it once and that’s it. If you lose it, you are SOL. To be honest, this policy sucks. They have a record of everything that I downloaded, why not let me just pull the files down again?

The final part of the disaster struck yesterday when my iPod got wiped. I’m not sure how this happened. One minute, all of my songs were there and the next minute…gone.

So now, I don’t have any backups of those albums. Now I’m pissed.

Since Apple does will not allow me to download these albums again, I’ve vowed never to purchase digital music again. Sorry, but I’ll keep my hard copy CDs.

If music is going to become completely digital, then these companies need to come up with some kind of policy that allows customers to get their music back in case of a disaster. Even if I could get the last 6 months of purchases back, I would be happy.

So let this be a lesson to you:

1. Whenever you buy music online, make a hard copy or two.

2. Read the policies of that store before you buy.

3. Pray that CDs never go away…