AS WE SEE IT

THIS ISSUE: You can lead a gift horse to water, but you can’t look him in the mouth.

In the 1980s, the CD nearly pushed the LP to extinction. Nearly. For all the claims of “Perfect Sound Forever,” the main thing offered by the CD was convenience.

Then, in the mid-1990s, the MP3 and the internet made it easy to extract and distribute the information encoded on a CD. Secret websites raced to be the first to distribute free MP3s of new recordings, sometimes even before they