Every city, college town, or suburban sprawl inhabited by music-hungry youth has one: the used CD/record store. It's a great place to hang out, meet people, explore new music, and, most importantly, get lots of cheap music. Walking through the aisles, an electronica fan with a secret love of bluegrass can find all these types of music, and everything in between. Forgotten 60s records dust-gathering in the corner are purchased by young teens, and the music of decades ago is played once again.

The charm of a secondhand music shop revolves around the idea of vast music exploration at insanely low prices. For those of you who haven't ventured to the local Sound Exchange, this idea probably sounds familiar. Limewire? iTunes? Torrentspy.com? With a computer and an Internet plug-in, we now have the ability to access millions of music files from all over the world.

In our increasingly digital world, creating and sharing music has radically changed from even decades ago. Nowadays, most young people store their music, both legally and illegally obtained, on their computer. Modern music is downloaded, sometimes through a legal service like iTunes, which set their price at a buck a pop. Older music is converted into mp3 form -- devices that rip songs off of records and convert them into digital form and are sold in most electronic stores. Songs stored in my music library come from importing albums from CDs on loan from the library.

This music phenomenon has arrived quickly, (My antiquated Backstreet Boys CDs from my elementary school years sit somewhere in my basement) and the music companies have caught on. Why spend money on the Yeah Yeah Yeah's album "Fever to Tell" when you only want to listen to one song on it? Placing the emphasis on singles, recording artists know that albums have become a thing of the past. In fact, the Yeah Yeah Yeah's second album, "Know Your Bones," angered fans of the original album as many deemed it nothing more than a poppy singles album.

In the diminishing value of the album, is the age of digital music destroying an important artistic aspect of music? If the Beatles' groundbreaking "The White Album" was released during today's rabid downloading society, would the album's greatest off-kilter gems be ignored? I tend to think that the reality is quite the opposite. On popular torrent sites, people can download entire discographies. Digital music offers a more compact and often cheaper way of owning music, which makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to acquire thousands of songs. Just look at the iPod, the active replacement of the Walkman. Instead of toting around 12 songs by The Beatles on a tape or CD, kids can carry around their entire massive body of work on an iPod Nano.

But apart from the exchange of music, there also stands the changing climate of recording and releasing music. Record companies who rail against downloading music claim that it takes away the money needed to record music, which is, or at least, was, a relatively expensive enterprise. Not anymore. Those same computers "stealing" away Justin Timberlake songs from the companies are now capable of recording and editing music. Garageband, an amateur recording software in the same vein of iMovie, now comes with the purchase of any Macintosh computer. Software for cut-and-paste techno music now sits on the shelves of the local Best Buy. Anyone can record his or her own music and release it on the Internet. Like blogs before it, what you are downloading and listening to could have been written and recorded by some guy in his underwear living in Japan.

Now, perhaps this thought scares you, but I personally find it quite refreshing. It's nice to see music back in the hands of the artists. Music was once not such a business -- it was communal entertainment, something to do while sitting with friends around the fireplace. Good music comes from people who enjoy creating it and enjoy sharing it, and the new digital age of music can allow this. Think about a band like the Arctic Monkeys, who were just a bunch of kids who played music and had a MySpace. Would this kind of quality music ever have reached popularity if it weren't for the Internet?

Karen Turner is a graduate of the 2008 class of Centennial High School. You can e-mail her at cdumler@theviewnewspapers.com.

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