2001-03-03 - 23:59:11

Is It A Crime?

I may have mentioned this before, but I really like music. In fact, I love it. It's not I hide it or anything: nearly the first thing that anyone noticed when then enter the Hamster Palace is my huge CD collection. I think I have about 2,200 CDs, along with a couple hundred vinyl LPs and nearly 1,000 singles. And a bunch of tapes. I have a lot of music!

For all that, I'm having a rather conflicted feeling about music these days.

For one thing, I'm finding popular music to be very disappointing right now. I think the year 2000 was a trough as far as my CD buying goes. There was very little I felt motivated to buy last year.

Part of it is that while I love music, I hate the music business. It really is very scummy. In recent years they seem to have got it down to an exact science: they rip off the performers and overcharge the music consumers. I'd like to give these middle-men the middle finger.

How many people here remember when CDs first came out? I distinctly recall that the record companies said that they were going to be more expensive than albums only for a short while, until they got the technology straight. That was, what, 13 years ago? The prices of CDs have never come down. In fact, your average retail price is now approaching $20.

This is in spite of the fact that everyone now knows that CDs are much cheaper to produce than LPs. Why else would AOL be able to give away MILLIONS of them?

I also have my own personal beef with the music business. Some years ago one of the music publishing firms (BMI I think) was busting my hump, saying that I had to pay them $500 a year for the privilege of playing the radio IN MY OWN STORE! I eventually was able to chase them away by proving that my poor little store had less than 1000 square feet of floor space. What a bunch of assholes! When I think of the THOUSANDS of dollars I've spent on LPs and CDs it makes my blood boil.

I think that musicians should be fairly paid for the work they produce, but as far as I am concerned, the music business is one huge scam. Oh I am sure that there are people in the music business who love music and who want to see artists reap the rewards of producing the sounds that make the public happy. However, like the joke goes, those 10% are giving the rest of the music biz a bad name!

Almost every artist I care about has some sort of music business horror story in their bio. For example, Aimee Mann, one of my favorite artists, was put through ten years of hell by dumbass record company executive scumbags. After all these travails she finally gave up on the record business altogether and produced and distributed her latest disc, Bachelor No. 2 all by herself. And what do you know, it's her most successful record since she went solo, 12 years ago.

What has me thinking about all this was a present my dear Lily gave me today. She gave me a CD that she burned herself ion her computer, full of songs that I'd been looking for, in some cases, for close to 20 years. The sound quality on the CD was excellent, in fact there were a couple of songs that sounded BETTER than versions of the same songs on the other CDs I have. Moreover she found improved versions of old songs that I only have on vinyl.

She found a crystal clear version of "our song" (You Belong To Me by The Duprees) that sounds like it was taken from the original studio masters. Every version of this song I have heard fades out, this one actually ends. The same is true of another song, Rolling Stone by the Cadets. I've been looking for that song on CD just about forever!!

Where did Lily get all this music? From Napster, of course. Probably by the time you read this Napster will be no more, or greatly changed.

Before this I had not been paying that much attention to Napster, in spite of the fact that Lily plays with it all the time. There were a couple of reasons for this: I didn’t trust the sound quality, I didn’t like the fact that my computer could be leeched off of, but the main reason was very practical: I'm almost out of disk space on my computer. I have no room on my hard drive for mp3s. It's all full of chess stuff!

Obviously the free downloading of music does a total end-run around the music industry, and BOY do they know it! This is why they are trying to crush this technology, but it's like trying to bash a ball of mercury with a hammer. It just goes everywhere!

I think that the message to the music industry is: your product is too expensive, of too low quality and of insufficient variety. Change, or be doomed!

Although, from what I understand, CD sales are booming now. Frankly if I was hearing more new music I liked, I'd be buying more CDs too but I'm too busy right now to play radio roulette. The heavy repetition of any radio station around here makes them almost unlistenable to me. I really only listen to Public Radio regularly.

I am really grateful to Lily for making this CD for me. Furthermore, using some software she had on her computer she was able to make a cute label for the disc and a little booklet to go in the CD jewel case. So very cool! Who needs record companies at all? May they rot in hell.