Week 9 - Music, Music, Music!

Okay, I am busy today because I have to do Week 9 and Week 10 today, since Week 10 is almost over and next week (Week 11?) I will be on vacation, swimming with the fishies. And by swimming with the fishies, I mean in a Jacques Cousteau fashion, not in a Tony Soprano/Jimmy Hoffa fashion. At least we hope not.

Thoughts on Copyright
As I have stated before, if I create something that others are willing to pay money for, as unlikely as that might be, I expect to be the one to receive the renumeration. On the other hand, I think that much of the cause for copyright violation is the price charged by the copyright holder for the art. Copyright says that your favorite artist's music is owned by Sony/BMG (just as an example). This is providing Sony with an effective monopoly on the sales and marketing of that art -- they can charge whatever they want and no one else can compete with them without violation of that copyright. While artists should be (but aren't always) appropriately compensated for their work, the actual publishing/distribution companies should be in competition for the buyer's buck for that art.

Thoughts on DRM
DRM is the spawn of Satan. If I have purchased a work on CD or DVD, I should be able to use that disk freely as long as I am not making money off that purchase. I should be able to make copies of it for backup purposes, transpose it into other forms for playback on non-native player devices, and create derivative works from it. As such, I have a very negative view of anything that restricts those rights. Fortunately, very few forms of DRM have avoided being trivially subverted. I like to see the death of DRM as much as Steve Jobs. He's in a better position to accomplish it, however.

Music Sites
Back in the late 1980's, I was flipping through a copying of Yachting magazine, green with envy for the avarice and ostentatious display of wealth that the glossy, full-colored pages provided. For young boat lovers, Yachting magazine is the equivalent of classy porn.

To my (shame? credit?), like other porn magazine that have come and gone through my life over the years, I actually read the accompanying articles. Now I know most of you, particularly the ones who feel that they should have some indignity over the subject as presented, are wondering how this relates back to music. Well, one of the articles in that copy of Yachting magazine was called "The Top 10 Boating albums." The article interested me -- what do people who have the disposable income that could allow them to buy a 110' yacht (or a record company!) listen to?

I took this list, and I went out and bought these 10 albums. Some, like Steely Dan's Aja, were well-known to me already, so purchasing them in an attempt to emulate the happy, successful, care-free lifestyle as portrayed in Yachting was easy enough. But there were some that I had never heard of, being raised as I was in the constant presence of '60's, '70's and '80's pop music. Two of those albums stick in my mind -- not just because they had funny names and were completely unknown to me, but because they both became a couple of my favorite groups in their respective genres. The first was Little Feat's Waiting for Columbus. It is the definitive piece from the group, and live to boot. Unfortunately, the CD version drops "Don't Bogart That Joint" which the album and double-length cassette both had. Obviously, some moralistic space-saving on the part of the record label. The only other southern rock group that I was really familiar with at the time was Lynyrd Skynyrd. The second album was Pat Metheny Group's As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls. Today, I own every album Pat Metheny (or his group) has produced, including his No Tolerance for Silence, which is 60 minutes of continuous freeform guitar which even most diehard PMG fans can't endure.

Still, when I went into LivePlasma and entered Pat Metheny Group, I was surprised how closely Steely Dan was linked, though clearly from the Yachting article I am not the only audience the two have in common. I was also surprised by how few of the linked groups and artists I did not have at least a single album from. Then I chose Chicago as a group, and was surprised to see that Steely Dan again was just a couple hops away. I wondered if a group could "purchase" associations to sought groups on the site. So I chose Secret Garden and was pleased to see that Steely Dan was nowhere in orbit around the group.

I have bookmarked Last.FM. My intention is to take those groups unfamiliar to me that circle the groups I do like in LivePlasma and give them a listen. I think the combination of the two site will be a powerful way to find new music. Though you can get a discography of a group in Amazon from the LivePlasma site, the Last.FM site will play the whole song for you -- not just the 30-second snippet that Amazon offers. I could listen to Last.FM all day (if it didn't bog down the network).

MyStrands was nice and I might use it in the future for its complete discography for artists, but it didn't really grab me as having more potential than many other sites. Upto11.net, whose name I certainly appreciate, gave me very different results from what LivePlasma seemed to provide. It appeared to be a more international selection, based on what others say they collect in addition to what you have entered as search criteria.

So now I'm going to put on my headphones, go back to Last.FM, and do Week #10. Post coming soon....