Entries Tagged 'Music' ↓

side-effects of having an iPod and using it every day is the enhanced appreciation I have gained for some of my favourite indie musicians. I have always had a preference for small bands who release their own stuff, and for a couple of years I might even have been mistaken as an expert in Canadian pop-alternative music, as I saw at least 100 shows a year from 90-95 or so, across the country. I have a ton of CDs that were sold from merch tables from Halifax to Victoria and everywhere - literally - in between.

I have a lot of that stuff in my iPod now, and it’s given me a new perspective on all of that material. A lot of it isn’t particularly interesting, frankly, and is more enjoyable as a document of a particular scene or moment in a local culture. But some of the stuff I have on this little box holds up very very well against the more popular material I have stored.

Jr. Gone Wild material is a great example. Edmonton’s seminal country-rock band was (and is) one of my favourites back before alt-country had been invented. They preceded and outlasted Uncle Tupelo, and although they never received the wide, genre-founding acclaim that Tweedy and Farrar and the boys did, their material hangs together and remains just as fresh-sounding as anything from UT, the Jayhawks or any of the rest.

Danny Michel is another great example, though more recent. I always listen to music now on full-library random - and so a Danny Michel song from “In the belly of a whale” came along… and it totally held up. Musically, lyrically, in terms of production values, however you slice it, it sounded just as great as the Tom Waits song that preceeded it and the Michelle Shocked song from Short Sharp Shocked that followed.

Is it possible that the performance of Like a Rolling Stone by Dylan and the Hawks in Manchester in 1966 (immortalized as the The Royal Albert Hall show) is the best rock and roll performance ever? I think it might be.

In Canada we can’t yet use the iTunes Music Store, which is bad enough, the only legal download site is called Puretracks. Trouble is, when I go to the site I get the following message:

Thank you for visiting Puretracks.com
Currently our website supports Internet Explorer 5.0 and above on the
Windows operating system (Win 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP / 2003),
and is available to Canadian residents only.
We value our Mac audience, however the Windows Media player for the Mac
platform is not currently compatible with Microsoft protected audio content.
Puretracks is currently working to make our service available to Mac users.

There are several problems with this. First of all, saying you value an audience while locking them out is NOT valuing that audience. More importantly, though, I think the companies trying to make a go of online music that tie that effort to a proprietary platform are making a big mistake and can’t, in the long term, succeed with such a strategy. The encoding method used by Apple, on the other hand, is available to anyone who wishes to use it, with no approval or license required from Apple. Tying DRM to the encoding itself is a serious conceptual mistake that a lot of people are making, and no matter how many companies signed up to play in the Microsoft sandbox I don’t think they can do well.

that Apple’s just-announced GarageBand will do to music what the Mac Plus, Word, and the dreaded San Francisco font did for personal publishing? Moof!

So today Apple unveiled its iTunes Music Store. $0.99 a song, handled through iTunes and facilitated by a .Mac or Apple ID. Is this the move that makes non-infringing online music happen?

Ten albums that changed my life

• I Just Can’t Stop It - English Beat
• London Calling - the Clash
• (self-titled) - Velvet Underground
• Murmur - R.E.M.
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back - Public Enemy
• Ziggy Stardust - David Bowie
• If I Should Fall from Grace with God - Pogues
• Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart - Camper van Beethoven
• (self-titled) - Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Electric Warrior - T. Rex

I share six of those ten.