Monday, March 3, 2008

Flash is the future

It's getting harder and harder to find music these days. At least in physical form.


Spending two hours browsing around a local CD shop sounds like a wonderful evening to me. My wife disagrees, but to be fair she's never had a reason to seek out much music. She is perfectly satisfied with the 20 songs the radio plays over and over again, and she doesn't really need to go out of her way to listen to them because she can hear those and others online anytime she wants for free. She can even enjoy just the choruses in ringtone format. With that immediate accessibility and overexposure, the artistic value of these songs become almost nonexistant, so it's no wonder that so few people are paying for them. These days something genuinely has to be unique for a person to take enough notice to go out to a store and purchase the physical product.

Music's most important format wasn't vinyl or the compact disc. It was the album. The whole package. The cover art, the sleeve. Even the smell. There is something special about holding a physical album while listening to it. Clearly I'm one of the few remaining people who feel that way. Many of the independent shops I've enjoyed over the years have closed, and mainstream sellers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart have decreased physical shelf space for CDs while they opened digital music stores on the web. This might not be up to me for much longer. Sure, the sound quality of the mp3s are poor compared to the old way, but I guess I shouldn't be picky. At least most of the great things I love about independent artists are still around. I'm willing to be okay with flash being the future as long as Fergie isn't my future.

Track 2: "Restless" by Unkle from "War Stories"
[iTunes] [website]

Josh Homme lends his drawl to this heavy hitter, one of my favorites from 2007. Best enjoyed in a loud dance club. It can also make a late night city drive a lot more exciting.

2 comments :

  1. March2theSea said...

    hi,
    thanks for the link!

  2. Roy said...

    Clearly I'm one of the few remaining people who feel that way.

    About vinyl, with the squiggly lines in the groove, and something about a clever technology that you can comprehend without spending four years studying pulse code modulation? Plus there was something about the ritual of taking the album out of the sleeve, cleaning it off with the anti-static brush and putting it on the turntable. Consider, too, that if the Beatles had sold songs singly on the Internet, we probably never would have heard "her majesty's a pretty nice girl some day I'm gonna make her mine."