“I spent hours putting that cassette together."

The world we occupy is teaming with cloud storage services and streaming music services and online mp3 stores and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Someone who's a lot smarter than me and maybe possesses an anthropology degree might say we're in the early stages of becoming an artifact-less culture. The National Museum of American History contains music-related objects from over 100 years ago: wax cylinders, glass discs, sheet music. What will the relics from this era be? Digital music players that look like Legos? An mp3 gift card with the silvery shit already scratched off? A thumb drive in the shape of Ke$ha's pointy head?

Digital downloads now trump physical music sales. Several years ago it was reported that "mp3" had replaced "sex" as the most searched-for term on search engines like Yahoo! and AltaVista. (Which is quite impressive, you have to admit.)

So what does this all mean? It means music fans can sound extra douchey and lament that they are suffering from a crisis of format, that convenience has become a burden. Being overwhelmed digitally means you can stress a desire to return to how music was once consumed -- yearn for a listening experience that takes one off the grid, so to speak. I'm reminded of a curator who said the first two questions he inevitably gets at an exhibit are "What is this thing?" followed by "Can I touch it?" Well, I want to touch stuff because I love touching stuff (I want to listen to it too, of course) -- more specifically, the stuff that's released on a format that is relatively cheap to produce, limited to tiny batches of a couple hundred, and generally disregarded.

As Chris Jahnle, founder of cassette label Kill/Hurt, recently said: "Mp3s sound terrible anyways, so why not have something that sounds terrible that you can hold?"