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As his seminal ode to vinyl hits its 20th, Nick Hornby writes for Billboard on where Rob and Laura would be now, and how today's clerks are still there, "sneering at your bad choices."

Here is how you started a music collection, if you were born sometime between 1940 and 1990: You bought an album, and for the time being, that album was all you had. You liked some tracks more than others at first, but as you only owned eight or 10 or 12 of them (maybe a few more, if it was a recently released CD), you couldn't afford to play favorites, so you listened to your one album over and over again until you liked all the songs equally. A couple of weeks later, you bought another album. After a year, you owned 15 or 20, and after five years, a couple of hundred.

Here is how you started a music collection in the early years of the 21st century: You gave an iPod to a friend or an elder sibling or an uncle, and you said, "Fill this up for me." And suddenly you would have a couple of thousand tracks, most of which you wouldn't ever listen to. If you're a teenager now, you wouldn't even bother going to all that trouble, because all the music ever recorded in the history of the world is in your pocket, on your phone. We know, because that's the way the world always works, that teenagers in 10 or 20 years time will be laughing and shaking their heads at the primitivism and inconvenience of Spotify -- "You had to wait a few seconds to download?" "Not everywhere had the Internet?" "You had to touch a screen?" But at this point, it's hard to imagine how music consumption of the future will be much easier or cheaper than it is now.

My first novel, High Fidelity, is about the lost but fiercely snobby people who used to sell us our music, back in the day when music was something you could touch and see and probably smell, as well as hear. (If I had been told, when I was writing it, that within a decade you'd be able to email a song, I'd have presumed that this meant you could also email a sandwich.) The book is now 20 years old, and the technological innovations of the last 15 years should by rights have made it look like a story about blacksmiths, or milkmen, or some other profession that has been murdered in cold blood by the modern world.