oh Kenny Loggins, how I miss you!

As a birthday/anniversary/father’s day present for my husband Dan, I volunteered to go through and organize all the music on his external hard drive so that it could be loaded neatly onto his new iPod.  Wow, I had no idea what I was taking on! 

I’m one of those overly organized individuals, and I guess I just assumed that most other people were at least somewhat organized, too.  I should have known better.  He has folders within folders within folders.  He has countless duplicates.  He has some things in mp3 format and some things in mp4.  I could go on and on, but Dan’s lack of musical organization isn’t the point of this post.  The point is: movie soundtracks.

Courtesy of Vinyl Revinyl and this random site

 Growing up in the 80s, there seemed to be countless awesome movie soundtracks.  Footloose, Top Gun, Dirty Dancing, Cocktail, Flashdance, The Big Chill, and I could go on!  The 90s produced just as many rad options, like Dazed and Confused, Empire Records, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and Singles.

Courtesy of State of Affairs and Rock on the Net

These albums were fabulous!  And not just one or two songs.  You liked every song on both sides of the tape (or record)!  You probably weren’t allowed to watch the movie when it first came out, but you could listen to the soundtrack with your parents, and everybody liked the music.  Every time my family went on a trip, a movie soundtrack was playing on the car stereo.

So what happened?!  Where are the movie soundtracks these days?  I know the music industry has changed a lot since I was kid—people prefer to buy individual mp3s verses entire albums, but come on, it’s simple marketing!  If the soundtrack sells well, the movie sells well, and vice versa.  And it’s hard to go wrong with a compilation album.  It's a great way to sample artists you don't really know.  Plus, if you like that one song by that one guy on that one soundtrack, you'll probably go buy some of his other stuff.  Maybe it’s just that I come from the “mixed tape” generation, but I miss the popularity of good movie soundtracks.