There are so many rabbit holes you can fall into on the internet. Days are lost when you remove yourself from them.
It's music for me right now. Not just surfing youtube either, streaming websites, reviews, biographies, touring information.
Then there's downloading, and the ethics of it.
I'm not even going to get into the RIAA's 75 trillion dollar lawsuit against Limewire. That money is a farce, but money is being lost. Lots of it. In some ways I feel sorry for the record companies, the industry is dead.
I heard an artist on the radio recently, within five minutes I had the goods, biography, band members, tour dates. I got all this by googling the lyrics of the song I was listening to. I did not even know the artist's name.
It's crazy, if you heard a song on the radio twenty years ago you had to wait for the DJ to tell you who you were listening to. If you did not get that, you could call the station or you were out of luck.
It's so easy now. Too easy.
The hunt is no longer about going to a record store, asking the owner what was new, what was good, if they had such and such a record. There's little pleasure in clicking around the internet looking for that Warren Zevon album. Much of the fun of record collecting is not knowing was in that bin you were flipping through. Now, you have an artist, a song, a video and it's there, within seconds.
There are over 5,000 songs on my iTunes, and there's room for a lot more on this hard drive.
Lately I've been finding demos, live recordings, unreleased albums that would have completely freaked me out if I found it on record or tape thirty years ago. Some of this music was rare, really impossible to find. Until the internet I had no idea it even existed. Now, one click. Scares the shit out of me how the commercial aspect has been completely removed from the situation.
Then there's the new material that has not even been officially released, the music I'm listening to right now that has a drop date more than a month from now.
What the hell?
Still, I look around online. Looking at the usual sites I've bookmarked for something new, or unusual. Google a concert date and hope for a hit. If anyone knows where I can find a Warren Zevon concert from Columbus in February, 1990, the link would be more than welcome. I know it's not going to be found at my local record store, and certainly not at Best Buy.
3 comments:
This post made me think a lot about my own habits - both before and after the emergence of the interweb. The 'hunt' for that elusive session track or live recording still exists, just in a different way. Not sure about it being 'too easy' though. I mean, sometimes even Mediafire just won't play ball.... ;) Oh, my own iTunes library is currently sitting at 19,720 songs. That's 55.8 days of pure audio pleasure. And then there is the vinyl and the tapes and the.... (I'm an addict, I need HELP)
What's just falling into my lap though websites astonishes me. In high school I'd have paid a lot of paper route money for these recordings and now it's a right click away. I've been able to find anything I've wanted through simple searches, except that Zevon!
My external drive has a 1TB of space. That's a lot of room.
Oh yes, I have a fair amount of vinyl, have not played a cassette since getting the adaptor in my car.
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