Man, I wish K-Tel were still cranking out hit collections. I’ve just never been able to get into the NOW That’s What I Call Music! sets. But hey, enough people love ‘em enough - so much so that the newest entry, number 22, debuted at number one. And this isn’t a first, friends. No, this is the eighth time this has happened.

This doesn’t cause me to give pause to the state of popular music and what people buy these days, but it does make me ponder upon the future of the album as concept. It seems the days of folks picking and choosing their songs instead of sitting and grooving to whole albums are near. Mp3 files taking over CDs and all that good stuff. But hey, it’s really nothing to fret about, lest we forget that time pre-mid-’60s when The Beatles, et al made album listening a Thing, and everyone was mostly grooving to singles. So consider it a step back as well as a step forward. Instead of vinyl, you’ve got plastic discs, or strings of 1s and 0s happily blasting forth the tunes.

Call me crazy, but I do foresee a time maybe not so far off when the CD becomes a dinosaur and digital files are the new 45. It’s an iPod nation, people. And I’m a 60 gigger myself.