How Do You Catch Your Tunes?

So Hayes, 26, has decided to dodge the digital music world altogether. He owns about 1,500 CDs. The CDs exist not in bytes, but in stacks -- lots and lots of stacks. He has downloaded few, if any, songs from the Internet. When he wants to buy an album, he uses his employee discount.

But he's learned a thing or two about how some people decide to buy music in what form.

For instance, people into classical music or jazz almost always buy actual CDs. That's because they are interested in the music's subtleties -- the highs of a saxophone, the lows of a bass drum -- that can be affected by the way digital files are created and compressed.

When it comes to rock music, he's found that the decision to buy a CD is often directly related to the band at hand. A Britney Spears album is generally not designed to be listened to in the same manner as a Radiohead album, which is to say as a collection of songs, a series of moments that add up to an experience, maybe even an epiphany.

The evidence:

"Oops! . . . I did it again. I played with your heart, got lost in the game," according to Spears.

Radiohead: "I call up my friend, the good angel/But she's out with her ansaphone/She says she would love to come help but/The sea would electrocute us all."

Hayes has also noticed that many music shoppers have a particular affinity for the $8.99 bin -- not for the price, though that's important, but for its contents. He points out an old Ry Cooder album. There's Billie Holiday. There's a remastered version of "Ocean Rain," released by Echo and the Bunnymen way back in time, in 1984.

"That's a classic album that everyone should own," Hayes said.

A classic album. That very description has gone classic, too.