"Play another record, Daddy," my son says, staring with fascination at the spinning black platter. My son is only 7, but he likes to rock. So I throw a little Killing Joke on and think back to my first summer after college to a late-hours club called the Vatican in Gainesville, Fla., where the playing of "War Dance" was a regular reason to hurl oneself onto the dance floor, with or without company.

Underneath Killing Joke in a stack of albums is Neil Young's three-record compilation, "Decade." Running my hands over its well-worn jacket, I recall persuading my grandfather to buy it for me when I was 13 or 14. He didn't know beans about popular music but he was trying to spoil me by offering to purchase one album. Being a sly opportunist, I picked an album that contained a whopping three records. And then listened to it, obsessively, for years.

Beneath Neil Young's plaintive visage stare the gangsta faces on the cover of N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton." The strutting of Easy E seems ludicrous now. But staring at him I recall a night, fueled on tequila and rage at a busted marriage, spent chanting "Fuck Tha Police" with a friend at 3 in the morning, while throwing darts at a picture of my ex.

It's easy to get nostalgic about lost eras. Record albums are cooler than CDs and even the pallid CD jewel-box is an improvement on the physical nonentity that is a digital file. It's easy to imagine that our lives are somehow poorer without these signposts. When, 30 years from now, my son and daughter look for mementos to evoke their childhood, what will they latch on to? A playlist? Is that enough?

I think, actually, that it is. Because the whole fetishization of object as memory aid, much as I like to wallow in it, is still a red herring. It's the music itself that carries the most evocative force, not the delivery mechanism, no matter how cool the holographic art on "Their Satanic Majesties Request" or how massive Bob Marley's spleef is on "Catch a Fire."

I'll be honest: making a symbolic point by ripping my vinyl in honor of Grokster was really just a side benefit to my main goal -- getting all my music into the format where it has the most potential to be a vibrant, enriching part of my life.

The truly remarkable thing about the digitalization of music, and the emergence of the computer as my playback device of choice, is that it has made me a more active listener and a more empowered consumer than ever before. I am exposed to more new music now, via the Internet, than previously, and I enjoy better, easier, more serendipitous access to my old music. A random shuffle of my iTunes library is a swirling kaleidoscopic tour of my personal history, a constant delight.

That library is a part of who I am, and once I get everything I ever loved in there, I'm going to make sure I never lose it again. And I'm going to share it with friends and family.

So my kids won't have albums or CDs to haul around with them. But they will have, in their iPods or laptops or Sony PSPs or some new, as-yet-inconceivable doohickey, unbelievably vast libraries of art and photography and music and history and literature and science that will be personal expressions of glorious complexity. And they will have unprecedented powers to express their creativity in all kinds of audiovisual splendor. The future will belong to those companies who figure out how best to serve them, while those that get in their way will themselves fall by the wayside. The future should belong to the smart -- to the TiVos and Apples and Googles -- the companies that are nimble and cater to our needs, rather than to those who thwart our desires.

An enlightened society finds the right boundary lines between what profits the corporation and what profits the soul. Decisions are always being made as to what is acceptable or not. Home taping: OK. Selling copies of pirated movies: Not OK. In between, it always gets messy. Computers and the Internet have made possible an era in which information and art can be shared and distributed as never before. And yes, that does mean that people will share things that don't necessarily belong to them. But that's a small price to pay for living in the future. Here's hoping the Supreme Court understands that, when, sometime in the next few months, it decides the future of the Internet.

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