Just had a bit of a realization that I am going to try to work out via this blog post while Saints/Cowboys pregame is on mute.
I recently invested in a terabyte hard drive for my laptop. I had a friend show me a similar drive that contained 600 gigs of mp3s that I had to have. Everything I ever wanted was there and available for the taking. The external hard drive cost me $110 after shipping and handling. After copying the drive and figuring a subpar way of hooking my laptop to my stereo, I have been enjoying the likes of Al Green, Os Mutantes, and lots of Django thanks to copying a music mecca made into mp3.
Just now, while listening to my new top play (Vince Guaraldi's Christmas album) I had a moment of realization. I bumped into this article on the Wired blog and realized I just made a poor decision. While the hard drive is filled with great Beatles rarities and Zappa interviews, as far as the music goes, I could have subscribed to one of these music networks and gotten a far greater amount of tuneage for a much better price.
I had always swiftly scooted these subscription services aside. The idea of paying a monthly rate for such a service seemed silly. I could buy the albums I wanted to hear and stream samples of other songs on blogs. Then, when I invested an amount of money that could have garnered me a year of Rhapsody or Napster usage, I realized that music ownership is on the way out.
I'ma just riffin here, but riff with me.
By buying a harddrive with maybe 30 gigs of music I really want and 400 gigs of music I will listen to once and delete, I'm not sure I really gained as much as I once thought. Plus, I am essentially breaking laws of copyright in the process. As a musician, I don't really get upset about illegal downloading as it is a waste of energy, but I still make jokes and occasionally utilize the phenomenon as a persuasive pity point. As a broke person with a love for music, I find myself downloading albums I want to hear all the time. This thievery is a weight I would like to take off my second hand smoke filled chest.
SO- a great way to have done this could have been to sign up for Rhapsody or Napster or anyone of the other applications out there that help support the industry that has supported me for the last few years. Instead, I invested that money on a digital brick that holds all the same information and will undoubtedly break before the next real wet season.
still just riffin here:
I think my problem is that I wanted to OWN all these songs, but I'm not sure why. I essentially paid the money I could have invested in a music service (and to a lesser extent; music culture) to some silicon valley hard drive manufacturer so that I could own a bunch of music. And that is the problem... yup, in the last two sentences I think I realized that my mistake is that I didn't go with music socialism. Perhaps some sort of hard wiring in my yankee brain caused me to denounce the idea of just sharing songs online. I demand ownership of these songs, even if I have to steal to do it! It's so messed up in my brain, that I think when I read over this blog post it wont make any sense.
I'm going to think about this a bit more and report back.
Early conclusions love the idea of one giant music network that everyone shares and logs into, but it seems anti-American at the same time, which I also love. Man- I'm really quite shocked at this revelation... probably guaraldi/rum-induced.
