Nick Hornby: The thrill of it all!

My first novel, High Fidelity, was published in 1995, and shortly afterwards, I embarked upon my first American book tour. I took with me a Discman, and 15 or 20 carefully chosen CDs in a wallet. Back then, the future of music didn't look particularly interesting to me. I don't mean that music itself seemed boring, although I was 38 years old, and I felt like I'd heard a lot of the mid-90s before. I mean that neither I nor anybody else I knew, spent any time thinking about how our consumption of music might change.

How could it? OK, someone might come up with another format, something that might sweep away the compact disc just as the CD had replaced vinyl. I certainly couldn't have imagined writing a novel which is in part about how we relate to music in the 21st century. Like most of us, I believed that this relationship would be a version of the relationship we all knew and loved, with a couple of extra volume knobs on.

As it turned out, it took me longer than it should have done to work out that the internet is one giant independent record shop.

And it's easy to browse. Look at Hype Machine (hypem.com) to begin with: in the top right-hand corner of the site, you'll see a list of the top five most-blogged artists, so you will get a sense of what's going on out there. The search engine will offer you a chance to listen to these artists, and, in the process, you'll get the chance to discover your favourite virtual record store, because every single one of those links you see will take you to a different MP3 blog.

I'll be off on a US book tour again soon, to promote a novel that is, in part, about how the world has changed since 1995. I'll be taking with me a small black box, no bigger than a packet of cigarettes, containing every piece of music I've ever loved. And a lot of that music - more than I could possibly have imagined five years ago when I was prepared to pull up the drawbridge [on music], albeit reluctantly - was made very recently.

If you love music, and you have a curious mind, there has never been a better time to be alive.