The news broke today that The Eagles are releasing their first studio album in 28 years....through an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart, now the largest retail "record store" in the United States.
VERY provocative! What do you think about this trend? The music business is morphing quicker than Keanu Reeves in one of those dreadful Matrix movies. I still have my sizable collection of vinyl albums and 45s on home-made wooden shelves, untouched for the last 4 years. I have a separate closet which houses my CD collection, numbering in the hundreds. In between I still have boxes and boxes of cassette tapes, all but abandoned.
Feeling ambitious, and prompted by a friend's successful urging that I buy an external hard drive, I have transferred roughly 75% of my CDs (which represent approximately 60% duplication of my vinyl) onto my computer, using ITUNES, which I have come to love...I still listen to music for literally hours each day, between my Ipod in the truck and "random" shuffle on my PC...It is like a 20-hour soundtrack of music I love. I find little pleasure anymore in listening to the radio, other than specific genre non-commercial radio.
I almost feel (don't hit me!) that I've pretty much got what I need and my insatiable thirst for the exciting and latest and greatest new music was quenched somewhere around the time the Ramones called it quits. Sure, there is the occasional new song that I simply MUST have, but in such cases, I usually drop 99 cents for the track at Itunes or just swipe it for free using Limewire. At the ripe young/old age of 51, the media suits me fine, though the aural quality of all those zeros and ones is less--IMHO--than what I used to get through my Technics turntable and my beloved Marantz receiver and those delicious, responsive JBL speakers that followed me through my 20s and 30s.
So what's the future?...More selective tune by tune migration to my ITUNES?...A resurgence of passion for modern recorded music (a New Wave, as they once called it?)?....
When I hear the Eagles are releasing a new album through an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart and Joni Mitchell is contracting with Starbucks, I wonder if I haven't outlived my usefullness....
Just a few thoughts...Thanks for listening....Maybe I can download some software and record this as a Podcast....Maybe the Miracle Ear corporation is interested in what a geezer like me has to say and I can swing something lucrative.....Whaddya think?
Long live rock and roll...
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1 comment:
sounds quite familiar - converting cd's to files and spending most of one's music listening time on the ipod while spending less time listening to new bands - it must be nature's way of telling us we're becoming grumpy old men
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