It's 1996 and I'm cursing my internet connection: I'm trying to download a leaked U2 song and so far it's taken me seven hours. The song, I'll later discover, isn't one of U2's best, and when it's finally downloaded it'll have cost me more in connection charges – back then, internet time was charged per-minute – than it would have cost me to buy Bono a house. It also sounds like it was recorded in a shed. But I'm listening to the future.
The future wasn't the song, but the format. It was an MP3, the compressed audio format that promised good-enough sound quality without the massive file sizes of CD-quality tracks. But it didn't matter if you had one of the best MP3 players, it didn't deliver anything of the sort, hence sounding like it was recorded in a shed, but it was convenient. That U2 song was the beginning of my decades-long love affair with digital music, a love affair that I think has run its course.
