I’ve been on a tidying binge this evening, and having found a bunch of CDs lying around in cracked cases behind the sofa, I’ve decided to rip them. So that my poor long-suffering NAS drive doesn’t have to think about two things at once, I’m listening to streaming music from Last.fm while I’m at it.

And it’s dawned on me that that’s really weird.

Last.fm, Pandora et al will let one create a playlist on the fly for any artist, album or genre, regardless of whether or not you own the song or even whether it exists in your country. For specific tracks there’s pretty much nothing that one can’t find on YouTube, just a Crtl+K away. So why on Earth am I bothering to rip things?

There’s travel, I guess - every few weeks or so I change the music on my phone. But that has Last.fm too. By the time the LTE & 3G cell coverage is in the same situation that 3G & GPRS is now, I’ll hardly be able to go anywhere without sufficient coverage to stream music.

I’m quite liking this “future” lark.