I grew up in a small Connecticut town.  My options for buying new music were limited in the eighties and early nineties .  There was the Record Town a few towns over, and the Record Town even further away at the mall.  That was it.

Before I was old enough to drive, I’d have to get one of my parents to bring me to get a new album every now and then.  I specifically remember being thrilled to find Achtung Baby on the wall when it came out.  Years after that I remember asking the kid that worked there to dig around in the back room to find the one copy of Phish’s Junta that the store received.  He’d never heard of them.

When I got older and was able to drive myself around, a buddy and I discovered a real Indie record store half an hour away.  They sold live bootlegs, which back then had to be imported from Europe.  This was a whole new world.  They were pricey, so you better take your time, choose, and get something good.  Over the years my friend bought tons of great Pearl Jam and Nirvana live discs.  I bought old Dead and Dylan shows.  The guys that ran the shop turned me onto Dylan’s famous ‘66 show from the Royal Albert Hall (“Judas, I don’t believe you. You’re a liar!”) when it was just part of the great unreleased Dylan lore.

We’d drive around with a handful of tapes, and later CDs, and listen to them over and over and over again.  Supply was limited, and you became very familiar with what you had.  The concept of actually wearing out a cassette was very real.

Skip ahead to today.  Generally speaking, almost every piece of music you would ever want is literally a few mouse clicks away—whether you live in Connecticut, Los Angeles, or North Dakota.  Everything is at your finger tips.  If you take away the price barrier (which, let’s face it, is a big reality) anyone can have access to as much music as they want, with the only limit being how fast they can download it, and how much free space is on their hard drive.

So the question that I keep running into with some of my most serious music friends is this:  Is this the golden age of being a music fan?

You can read about an obscure jazz musician that influenced your favorite artist and be listening to his work minutes later.  I’m pretty sure that Record Town didn’t even have a jazz section.

In a lot of ways, it doesn’t get much better than that.  But still, is there something missing from the experience?  With everything so easily available, it’s almost overwhelming.  ”I downloaded that, but haven’t listened to it yet” was not something that you heard when you had to plan out your monthly trips to the record shop up the coast.  When you decided to buy something you listened to what you bought.  They you listened to it again.  And again.

Does that mean there aren’t kids out there that are listening to Terrapin Station endlessly on repeat, or locked in their rooms trying to find all the hidden secrets on the new Mastodon record?  Of course there are.  But I know that when I fire up iTunes it’s so easy for me to skips tracks and jump from artist to artist that I find myself doing it all the time.  And I’d guess many others are doing the same.

The fundamental ways in which I listen to music have changed, but along with that, the musical possibilities have expanded endlessly.

I’ve heard passionate arguments from serious folks on both sides of this discussion, and I don’t think either is right or wrong.  Ultimately, access to a wide range of music—that would have been impossible to find not many years ago—is a good thing for any serious music fan.  I just need to stop and remember how some of my favorite music of all time was burned into my head over and over again when I was a kid, because that’s a good thing too.

Man, it hit me hard last night.  I went to the new House of Blues on Lansdowne Street to see Bloc Party. Before the show we’d been talking about the music scene in Boston, and how it’s changed.  Someone mentioned Mama Kin, Aerosmith’s old Lansdowne Street club that I used to go to in college.  And of course the House of Blues is built on the spot that used to be Avalon and Axis and many more longtime Boston music venues before them.

I guess I’ve been in Boston for a long time, but I rarely stop to think about it.  Going to college here in the mid-nineties, all I did was go to shows around town.  All these old clubs.  A lot of them still there, some of them now the House of Blues.

Standing at the Bloc Party show got me thinking.  The kids down in front jumping up and down to the music; college sophomores that’ll hop on the T after the show and go back to their dorms.  Those kids used to be me.  That’s a fairly generic and clichéd thought—but not one that I have very often.  The thing that fucked with me is that I was those kids when I was in college, and that was a long time ago at this point.  Going on fifteen years ago, my god.

The funny thing is, that period of my life—all that time I spent bouncing around clubs in Boston—lead pretty directly to where I am now.  I met people through that scene that ultimately lead to me getting a job in the music industry.  A job that I still have.  I’ve been at this gig for the better part of a decade at this point, which I guess is no small feat given the insane changes the industry has gone through during that time.  I mean right now, in 2009, it’s hard to imagine the iTunes Music Store not existing.  It’s downright insane to remember the fact that the iPod didn’t even exist when I started this job.

It’s also crazy to realize that the kids jumping up and down in the front rows of the Bloc Party show were maybe 12 years old when I started this job, because it doesn’t feel like that long ago.  And I don’t feel that different.

Fifteen odd years is a good chunk of time, especially when it’s from your late teens to your early thirties. Don’t get me wrong, this is no “oh to be young again” lament.  I like right where I am.  I’ve been lucky. I’m still going to the same clubs and walking down the same streets—except now I’m trying to remember where I parked the car and wondering if I’ll make it to the encore, instead of trying to remember what time the last train leaves.