We have been feasting on free lunches of digital music for years with little thought as to how free they are and a total disregard to their nutritional value.

Within seconds, we can own any song from a vast online musical spectrum and can either fork over a few bucks on iTunes or Zune or rip it free from LimeWire. Any guess as to what the majority of us cash-strapped college students opt for?

This is not going to be a discussion of the ethics of file-sharing and free music, nor a bold forecast of things to come. Instead, let’s step back and observe what our generation’s consumption of music means for tangible media (read: records and compact discs), whether “free” music is ever actually free and, if we do pay for it, do we ever actually own it?

My laptop is in exile at a repair shop in Kansas City, bugged to oblivion. Though it holds every piece of music I’ve ever owned hostage, I began wondering whether digital music was worth it. Did this instantaneous method of acquiring music trump the feeling I once had tearing wrappers off CDs, poring over the album’s artwork and liner notes and sliding the disc into the nearest player?

Fitfully tucked away, up a flight of stairs at its 936 ½ Massachusetts St. location, Love Garden Sounds is like that rare park surrounded by a metropolis. It’s evidence that, amidst a music marketplace that needs wires and cables to exist, one can still hold real music and interact with living, breathing people.

And Love Garden defiantly breathes with ease. It is enjoying one of its best sales months in the past year and a half, owner Kelly Corcoran said, attributing it to a rapport between him and his customers that allows him to know how many and what records and CDs to provide. On any night, one could walk into the shop to see records lining the walls, any of the four store cats walking along a sea of used and new CDs and real people with real opinions sipping Hamms Beer. Here, music is still purchased and collected. You can see what you buy.

“People who have digital music don’t necessarily feel the need to have the music long term,” Corcoran said. “They view it as disposable and don’t worry about it being lost since they can just download it again for free.”

Corcoran quickly agreed when I suggested that CDs are evolving into a nostalgic niche much like vinyl records.

But they are also insurance. See, I was able to copy my MP3 music back onto my repaired computer, but what happens if my Zune crashes? All it takes is a permanent error or another computer bug to make every song I’ve owned disappear.

“American consumers seem happy to make the trade-off of sound quality in exchange for portability and massive storage libraries,” said Paul Marshall, DJ from Kansas City’s 98.9 The Rock, in an email. “What they need to realize is that you don’t really own anything tangible when you ‘buy’ an MP3, and it’s never forever.”

All hard drives crash eventually, he continued, thus necessitating the use of blank CDs or external hard drives for backup.

But any real personal connection is still missing.

There is something to be said for digital music; I’ve begun downloading legally but still purchase entire CDs I really want. A final thought: Years spent downloading “free” music off LimeWire were responsible for my computer’s debilitating virus. The repair costs? $170. Funny, that would’ve gotten me almost 17 CDs.

— Montemayor is a Mission junior in journalism.