Category Archives: Music

Share and Share Alike

At the office, we were debating the issue of file sharing and its impact on artists, specifically whether or not a digital distribution system for music sales would allow artists to see a larger share of the proceeds from every sale. The argument was made that the low overhead of digital distribution doesn’t necessarily ensure that artists will see more money and in fact it may mean that they get a reduced share of the profits.

That’s when I realized that, after all the fuss over Napster (whose impending relaunch actually kicked off this conversation), Gnutella and lawsuits filed against individual users by the RIAA, I’ve developed a pretty callous attitude towards artists’ rights. This may anger some of my friends who are musicians and who aspire to become very well-paid musicians for a living, but at this point, it doesn’t really matter to me much whether artists get their fair share of money from recordings or not.

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Biomusicologist

Ted Leo/PharmacistsThough the nature of recent posts might suggest that I’ve become exclusively preoccupied with politics and baseball, I’m still heavily invested in other interests like music and movies. Well, not exactly movies, because a busy schedule at Behavior has pretty much precluded me from very many two-hour blocks of cinema or DVD time. I’ve been keeping a mental list of movies I want to be sure to find the time to watch, but I have no idea when that’s going to be.

As for music, well, thanks to my iPod and the fact that the act of designing is conducive to concurrently listening to music, I’m still a steady consumer of pop. Looking back at the past month or so, I’ve downloaded a ton of tracks from Emusic. Not all of it has been particularly good, but I’ve found a few gems, including “The Tyranny of Distance,” a two-year old album from Ted Leo/Pharamacists.

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BuyMusic.com’s Tin Ear

BuyMusic.comIf you’re a fan of Kelly Clarkson, Justin Timberlake and/or Coldplay, and you want to download their songs to your Windows computer, then you have my sympathies. Without signing on to one of the competing subscription-based services and committing to monthly payouts to the major label record companies, the only real choice you have is the recently launched BuyMusic.com, and it totally sucks. I know this because I used it for the first time today and my experience was very, very poor.

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EMusic versus iTunes

eMusicIn just a few days of having a trial membership to EMusic, I’ve already downloaded more songs than I have in months of browsing the Apple iTunes Music Store, and this in spite of how much my bias towards all things Apple wanted to like the that Mac-only service. Once or twice a week, I would browse its catalog, hoping that I would come across some music that was remotely interesting enough for me to shell out 99¢ or more, but more often than not, I came up short — the albums I wanted were missing, or their track listings omitted crucial songs. I think I bought one album and three individual songs from the iTMS, for a grand total of about US$13.

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Enough Is Not Enough

iPodMy iPod has instilled in me a disturbing insatiability for more music, more often. Where once I was satisfied with a new CD or two each month, I now find myself on an endless trawl for MP3s to add to my hard disk. It’s a sickness; I have more music now than I could possibly have time to enjoy — my iTunes library alone is 8.5 GB, and I have stacks of Squat CDs that haven’t been ripped yet, plus all my old CDs from my pre-MP3 days — and yet it never seems enough.

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The Fantastic Fourth

The Invisible Girl“The Invisible Girl” is the title for my latest contribution to the Squat mix CD club. It’s not as late as its predecessor, but it wasn’t on time, either; I only shipped it today, two and a half weeks after the original deadline of 31 May. If I can offer any excuse, it’s that my packaging for this round was more complex — and expensive — than ever.

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The Morning Commute

Radiohead “Hail to the Thief”Two anecdotes from my daily walk to the office: First, it was a beautiful morning to release a new Radiohead album; the skies were a calming, solid blue and the sun is finally, after weeks of miserable precipitation, pouring down clean, bright light again. There’s a Virgin Megastore at Union Square and as I walked past it I saw one satisfied consumer after another exiting its doors with a copy of “Hail to the Thief,” happily heading off into the springtime. I walked a little further into the park and I saw a young woman sitting on a bench beneath an old, old tree, already listening to the CD on her Discman and reading along with the lyrics intently.

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The ‘i’ Is for Indie

It’s a relief to me that earlier this week Apple finally gave a presentation to independent music labels on the subject of getting their music into the iTunes Music Store. As these first-person notes on the meeting suggest, the company is serious about diversifying the content for sale via their breakthrough foray into music retailing. That’s great news, because as I mentioned when the store debuted, its offering of actually interesting music leaves much to be desired. If enough indie labels come aboard — and all signs indicate that they’re champing at the bit to do so — it will exponentially improve the value of the iMS, at least to my mind.

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My Stereo Runneth Over

Six New AlbumsFor several months my consumption of new music has been pretty tame, but this past week saw a surge in album acquisitions; there are currently about six new sets of tracks in heavy rotation on my iPod. It’s not just the buzz around the iTunes Music Store that has me playing the part of the good consumer; I’m also gearing up to make another Squat mix, which entails gathering lots of new source material.

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Instant Gratification

iTunes 4Having now actually made two purchases at Apple’s iTunes Music Store, I can report that the service, once you get it running, is frighteningly easy to use. It took me a day or two to register with the store because the initial frenzy of its debut had Apple’s servers tied up in knots. But once I did, I found that downloading a song was really as simple as clicking on a single button. Dangerously simple.

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