The digital drums are beating for the music industry - not since the compact disc invaded the racks of music stores has the business of marketing and distributing music been so about to be revolutionized. Let's face it the DAT never quite made it past rich tech heads and audiophiles. Internet music however, is being readied for radio-like use and its proliferation is to be accepted. The merger of EMI with AOL Time Warner is bankable for the music biz. So it's a digital discography we'll all be partaking in with its ability to select and mix your own compilations and burn them onto a disk.

Sifting through a box of 20th century ephemera, I recently came across and eight track cassette--Led Zeppelin II, one of my all time faves. Everyone knows this album, so I'll dispense with the usual musical accomplishments of the recording, we already know Whole Lotta Love rocks as does Heartbreaker and the entire ten tracks (Ramble On in two parts).

It's the innocence of the thing that gets me--a pretty pink plastic container to hold the quarter inch brown tape. Its notable that the record was released by Atlantic Records, since then swallowed up whole during the many mergers and acquisitions of the eighties and nineties. Albums and cassettes have two sides - compact discs play beginning to end on one - but eight tracks where set up in quadrants, four "sides" to a recording. Who could forget drinking beer making out with your girlfriend to the accompaniment an eight track clicking loudly to the next side during make out sessions?

To those who are born digital, you punks have missed out on this outmoded way of listening to music. It's the new collectible you PC bastards. They're getting harder to find in respectable shape and I have em. Now if only I could find a goddamned eight track player.