Before you make any assumptions, I’ll start off by saying that I’m not here to solicit for Al Gore’s campaign against global warming. This article is meant to make you aware of a more powerful, and personal, inconvenient truth: Music and how the internet is changing the industry drastically.

I remember the good old days. Those were the times when people made some sort of an attempt to actually attain a physical copy of music – a CD.

I can clearly remember 6 or 7 years ago when CDs were generally the only option. The iPod changed that several years back, and since its introduction, CDs have quickly become a thing of the past for many consumers. I’ll never understand it.

To be blunt, with every generation comes more impatience and along with impatience comes the need for instant gratification, hence the digital age. But obtaining music via the internet completely leaves out a whole different experience. I still love CDs. It means something to me to actually hold a physical copy of music, a.k.a. a record – the whole package. One of the greatest things about owning a CD is the album packaging itself.

Even to this day, every time I pop a CD in the player, I take the booklet out of the case and follow along with the lyrics. Hopefully you’ve experienced that before–-it’s just fun. To me, you can’t get the same satisfaction out of music without that experience.

Buying music online is just one side of the story though. Piracy (illegal downloads) and websites like YouTube and MySpace that stream full length music have lessened the need for purchasing music altogether. The evidence? In 2007 alone, sales of CDs fell 13%. This can hugely be attributed to the some 30 billion illegal downloads last year.

The International Herald Tribune reported last month that 39% of teenagers just in the US alone use illegal file sharing networks to access and download music at no cost to them, but at a huge cost to the industry. Do people not realize that this is stealing, or do they just not care?

Analysts predict that a combination of illegal downloads and online music sales will put the CD industry out of business within the next 10-20 years, which means in the next couple of generations, “Compact Discs” will have no meaning–-we’ll be 100% digital.

The bottom line is, whether you choose to buy CDs or MP3s, be conscious of your decisions. In many ways, the digital era can be a good thing-–it gets the word around faster if one thing’s for sure. But download legally. Support the artists who are making the music for you. But the option is open-–let’s keep the industry and CD sales alive.

I’d like to see them around for a long time to come, wouldn’t you agree?