As arts editor for The Daily Collegian, one of my weekly jobs is updating the Billboard charts for the third page of Venues, listing the top-selling albums in the country.

As a musician and a lover of music itself, I often feel like one of my "jobs" is making sure that musical integrity, both my own and of the artists I listen to and support, stays intact.

With that in mind, you can imagine my disappointment in seeing a record titled Now 14 at the top of the charts every week. The Now series is a periodically updated collection of discs that compiles the hottest new music onto one, easily accessible piece of plastic.

A lazyman's library of trendy tunes. A radio with a pause button.

My problem with these compilations is not the music itself; Beyonce can put out as many solo albums as she wants, as far as I'm concerned. But that's exactly the point -- a Beyonce solo album is an album, a collection of her own material, placed in context with other songs, over which I'd like to think she had some creative control.

The Now discs are not albums. The songs have no context, no flow, no artistic integrity. Yet, they are selling better than the real albums from which the songs were stolen. Is new music so disposable that we can throw it into one bucket and label it with a lifetime in its very title? Just how long is Now? The series is ultimately an insultingly disposable product.

Whatever happened to the strategic placement of one song after another to form a rewarding final product? Some artists still get it, like Fantomas, whose latest release, Delirium Cordia, features one 55-minute-long track. Clearly, that's an extreme case, but there's something to the idea of the "big picture" that the Now CDs take away.

Didn't Pink Floyd teach us anything?

The Now compilations are inarguably disposable; in the name itself, these discs are meant to only last for a certain amount of time. All one has to do is pull up the statistics for one of the older volumes to see that "hot" hits from The Baha Men and B2k have all but faded.

And this numerical system is too confusing for me; why not just call the newest one Now when it comes out and re-title all the older ones Then?

But perhaps the biggest problem with these CDs is the total disregard for artistic control. It's not hard to see that the violently random placement of a heavy metal song next to a J-Lo butt-shaker is just as bad as reckless usage of a downloading service, except artists are getting money for being on Now.

If any artist on a Now CD has any preference as to how he or she would like his or her song to be heard, there's nothing they can do. Now 10 features Justin and Britney on the same disc, only five tracks apart; can we imagine they're happy about that? These "artists" have sold their souls -- I mean, songs -- to make a few quick bucks on the side. One could argue that these CDs must be the "best" music out there if they're selling so well. The problem here is that they are never advertised as being the "best," but rather as being the "hottest." Call me a music snob, but I would think that "best" is decided by picky critics and music fans looking for something satisfying, special and above-and-beyond. Whereas, "hottest" is decided by people with an image to maintain, for people who have images to maintain.

The Now CDs are robbing popular culture of honor and variety. That is, of course, unless your CD player happens to have a "shuffle" mode.

But if you're the kind of person who buys a Now CD, you're probably not interested in hearing things in a different way.