Since getting online some years back, music information has been growing steadily. I no longer need to rummage through endless racks of magazines hoping to find back issues of The Wire, Raygun and Alternative Press. Information I want regarding certain artists are just a few clicks away. And not only do I get articles and reviews, most of the time I can listen to samples of their tracks through streaming audio. But that was at the dawn of the information superhighway. Now that bandwidths are getting "wider and wider", and internet service providers' price tags are dropping lower, not to mention the technology in audio and video encoding getting more competitive - music has become readily available to us, even those of the obscure kind. We are now at an information overload when it comes to music. For those of us who search deeper than your run-of-the-mill current pop sensation anyway. It's like being a kid in a toy store with a blank check clutched tightly in his hand. Music, esoteric or otherwise, was at my disposal.
But...as fun and exciting as that may sound, the drawback is that I no
longer get that special gratification of buying a new cd. Of waiting for my favorite artists' new albums to reach our shores, if they ever did. The thrill of the hunt is almost entirely gone. And I miss that intimacy you get when listening to your favorite albums because now I have more music than I have time to listen, even though I have an iPod. For example, I haven't listened to Skinny Puppy's new album "Mythmaker" the way I ravaged "Rabies" more than a decade ago. I'm not as intimate with Miranda Sex Garden's "Carnival Of Souls" as I was with "Fairytales Of Slavery" (which seems to have it's every chilling note engraved inside of me). And the thrill of discovering the music of John Cage was not as ecstatic as my discovery
of Black Tape For A Blue Girl. It just wasn't the same anymore.
Yes, I download music, and I'm not too proud to admit that. But what do you think will a drug addict sitting in front of free crack do? Ask where he could buy it? I think not. Is there guilt with every download? Yes, but it also comes with insatiable lust for new music.
But...as fun and exciting as that may sound, the drawback is that I no
longer get that special gratification of buying a new cd. Of waiting for my favorite artists' new albums to reach our shores, if they ever did. The thrill of the hunt is almost entirely gone. And I miss that intimacy you get when listening to your favorite albums because now I have more music than I have time to listen, even though I have an iPod. For example, I haven't listened to Skinny Puppy's new album "Mythmaker" the way I ravaged "Rabies" more than a decade ago. I'm not as intimate with Miranda Sex Garden's "Carnival Of Souls" as I was with "Fairytales Of Slavery" (which seems to have it's every chilling note engraved inside of me). And the thrill of discovering the music of John Cage was not as ecstatic as my discovery
of Black Tape For A Blue Girl. It just wasn't the same anymore.Yes, I download music, and I'm not too proud to admit that. But what do you think will a drug addict sitting in front of free crack do? Ask where he could buy it? I think not. Is there guilt with every download? Yes, but it also comes with insatiable lust for new music.
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