A Music Lover’s Response to Rolling Stone.

On the 19th of this month, Rolling Stone released an article which discussed the decline of the recorded music business, and attempted to analyze it’s fall.

Much of this article makes complete sense and it is precisely what many music lovers have been saying since the RIAA filed its original lawsuit against Napster. Give us digital music. Do not tell us how we will listen to music that we pay for the right to listen to, we will decide that for ourselves, thanks. Do give us a better way to fill our lives with music at a price that makes sense.

Note what I said there: Pay for the right. Most people believe that when they pay for something, that means they own it. Now, obviously I don’t have the right to release tons of copies of James Blunt’s latest CD and make money off of them… but *I* do have the right to listen to the CD because I paid money for it! And if I want to listen to it on my iPod, or in my car or as a ringtone on my cell phone, why should anyone else care? I paid for it and that means that I should get to choose how I listen to it.

That is what music lovers believe they have purchased when they buy a cd or download a song off iTunes, and the music industry has never been able to wrap their head around it and it’s only part of why their business is failing.

The other reason why they are failing is because of people like me.

I have been desperate to find CDs to blow my money on, but I can’t justify spending my money on the latest pop act. My teenagers don’t even listen to that bubblegum crap. The last CD I bought was originally released in 1999 (Powerman 5000’s Tonight The Stars Revolt), and I purchased that CD a few days ago. The other two CDs I bought with it were both released in 1991. The most recently released CD that I purchased for myself was an anime soundtrack. Before that… I picked up a copy of The Rolling Stones 40 Licks, and The Beatles 1. Why? Because these CDs have good music and I was guaranteed to not get ripped off.

I purchased a CD not that long ago by Evanescence. I was in love with “Bring Me to Life” until the radio overplayed it so much that I stopped turning on the radio in my car so I could avoid listening to the damned song. The rest of the CD… was a waste of my money. I never listen to anything else off of it. I spent 15$ on a CD so I could listen to 1 song. This is how it goes with every CD that I have purchased that is not at least 7 years old.

As a result of my experience with purchasing music from new acts, phrases like this one at the end of the Rolling Stone article… simply blow me away: “We have great records, but we’re less sure than ever that people are going to buy them,”

Let me put this into perspective for you guys as a music lover who listens to her iPod every single day: If the recording industry had great records, I would buy them!

I would not be importing CDs from Japan! I would be walking into Wal-mart or Best Buy, or I would actually sign up for an iTunes account because there would be music that I would want to spend my money on available to me… but there isn’t! What I would want to spend my money on, I already own on CD because it’s been around for ten years.

Music right now… is shit, and when the occasional rare gem comes along, it is destroyed within weeks by radio stations overplaying songs to death. I can’t blame the DJs for that, even though I know computers do most of the DJ’ing for them… good music is hard to find, especially in this day and age.

We’ve been busy!

It’s been a busy few weeks for me. I got sucked into reading Plato’s Republic for my philosophy class and now I’m reading Descartes. Or at least… I’m ditching the reading of Descartes that I am supposed to be doing, in order to bring you this post!

The democrats won many seats in congress on November 7th. That was sad. Most disappointing for me is that Maria Cantwell won again, and no matter how hard I try I can’t seem to vote that woman out of office. Even though she is almost single handedly responsible for the increase that we are about to receive in our power bill that may drive several Washingtonians out of their current lifestyles due to their inability to be able to afford expensive wind-power, which power companies are now required by law to use here in our state. I mean… forget the fact that Washington doesn’t get all that much wind in areas where that power would be most useful… forget the fact that we already have hydro out the wahzoo. No no, we need a more expensive form of “renewable” power sources. Sure it’s renewable, as long as you can figure out how to make the wind blow hard enough to turn the windmills… We can also forget the fact that the RIAA has her in their pocket. Let’s just forget all of it.

In addition to all of the world wide weirdness, such as K. Fed and Britney Spears getting divorced over text meassaging, I’ve also been spending more money on my anime collection. I updated the anime collection page today so you can see what new things I’ve blown money on this month. I’ve also started my xmas shopping and have yet to finish my birthday shopping (even though many of those birthdays have long since passed… ) and really… that’s about it.

Say what you will about Best Buy…

… I have my laptop back. I called them on Sunday and I got the part today, within their promised 3-6 days for part replacement and my laptop is running fine again!

I’ve asked my husband to install a surge protector in the kitchen counter, where I spend most of my time with my laptop, and I think this will solve all of my laptop woes for quite some time. Now I just have to make sure I take it in for a cleaning and get the battery replaced before the warranty runs out and this laptop might make it for another couple of years after that.

Even though this laptop is heavy and I would love an excuse to get a new one now, it does everything I need it to do. I don’t encode video with it anymore. I did try, but my laptop tends to sort of look at the process of encoding a dvd and promptly runs away screaming like a girl. I don’t play games on it, so I don’t need something top of the line. I need a machine that runs internet applications well, connects with my various gadgets, and won’t keel over dead when I put a DVD in it. For these things, my husband’s laptop is nice but I always feel like I’m going through his underwear drawer when I borrow it. Even though he’s my husband, there’s still something inherently wrong with going through someone else’s underwear drawer.

Antique Technology Still the Norm in Public Schools?

At the end of the school year last year, my son’s history teacher handed him his floppy disk from school and told him that his paper, that he had to have finished two days later, was on it and should be taken home so that he could finish it.

My son came home and handed me the floppy disk and I looked at it, then handed it back. He said, “No, mom my homework’s on there.” I looked at the floppy and looked at my 3 year old laptop, the oldest windows machine in the house, and pointed out to my son that it does not have a floppy drive. In fact, we do not have a single windows machine in the house that has a floppy drive because computers simply do not ship with them anymore. I handed him my thumb drive and told him to ask his teacher to put the file on there for him, and to work on what he could remember while he was at home that night.

The next day, the school librarian e-mailed my son his paper from her gmail account. The reason? Students and teachers at his school are not allowed to plug anything into the usb ports on the computers at school. When we talked to his history teacher about this, all he could say was that the school’s computers were old and the network administrators didn’t take any crap off teachers, students or parents. We explained to him that anyone who had purchased a new pc in the last four years probably didn’t have a floppy drive either. He said he knew, but there was nothing he could do to change the school district’s policy on computer use. My response was, “Then next time, don’t require my child to type a paper here at school because he has no way to transport it between school and home to work on it.”

This year, I got the kids’ school supply lists in the mail. On my son’s list it had the dreaded words “computer disk”. I was tempted… very tempted… to send my son with a blank CD. I know that they mean floppies, but I almost felt it was necessary to prove a point by faking out a new teacher and explaining that floppies are so antiquated and we just paid 11 million dollars for the school district to buy new computers for the children so I could only assume that they meant that my son needed a blank CD though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. A thumb drive would do the job much more efficiently and be safer for the school’s computers because thumb drives don’t try to execute code the minute you plug them in.

Imagine my surprise when I would have to say, “What do you mean, you meant a floppy disk? Don’t you realize that in order for me to support that technology here at home I have to go buy a 40$ external floppy drive, plus pay for the aforementioned disks, of which he will only ever need this one that you are insisting that he have. This is not to mention the time it will take me, at home, to ensure that each time that floppy is inserted into the USB drive, which will only ever be used to read this one floppy, it will be scanned for viruses because floppies have a bad habit of coming home loaded with them. Am I allowed to charge *you* a technology fee that can be deducted from the bond we just passed for the school district so that we wouldn’t have to put up with obsolete beasts such as floppy drives?”

I put the thoughts out of my mind when I realized that this would do no good and would only irritate a poor, underworked and overpaid member of the Washington Education Association. After all, these teachers can’t even teach the kids enough to pass state or federal standardized testing and have put the school districts in our state at risk of losing federal funding.

They blame No Child Left Behind, but the thing is the government isn’t leaving the children behind. Inadequate teachers, technology and management of funds are.

Potato Chip Culture?

This is an interesting article about the future of culture in American society and the impact that current copyright law has on it.

The argument is that culture will become like a bag of potato chips. Something to be consumed, but not to be created. It’s an interesting argument, and I think that in some respects, the guy is right, but the trick that he’s missing is that first you have to have people that want to create things like music, movies and books that also want to give them away for free. Those people who do choose to do that, are doing so to gain exposure for themselves and the possibility of a contract.

The sad fact of our society is that sooner or later, it always comes down to money.

Ah lovely spam

Lately I seem to be getting more comment spam. I wonder if one of the search engines has finally indexed my blog and made it more visible to the spammers.

Just a re-cap for all of you spam loving fiends out there, your comments will never see the light of day past my inbox, if they show up in my inbox at all.

Not like this does much good, most of those things are automated, but I figured it was worth a shot.

Why I didn’t jump on the iPod bandwagon.

Recently in an online chat channel, I made a confession that I own a creative zen micro. The reaction I got to this surprised me. “I can’t believe it. Isn’t each state only allowed to have one zen owner?”

The next morning the news articles started coming out with rumors of Microsoft’s “Zune” player and those articles put Apple’s share of the mp3 player market at 80% of all mp3 players owned. It made me think hard about why people wanted an iPod, and why I didn’t choose to get one.

The biggest reason is probably that I already owned a Sony PSP. The PSP is a supreme device for watching portable video on, with great sound and even better video. The video iPod did not tempt me with its small screen and sound quality that true audiophiles rate as being not bad, but not all that, even with high quality headphones. So when I went looking for a device, I didn’t need an all-in-one. I had the PSP for that, the only complaint I had with the PSP is that it’s almost too bulky to be portable for someone who wants music on the go, and the remote is poorly designed for a driver to mess with while operating a vehicle.

I needed something that fit in my pocket with clean menus that you could navigate at a stoplight without having to dig six layers deep and push numerous buttons. That’s when I started looking at the other music only players on the market.

First, I took a long hard look at the iRiver H10. It’s a nice player, loaded with features and has a color display. Great sound quality, nice player. But after playing with the device at an electronics superstore I found that I hated the slide bar navigation. It was difficult to use because the device did not fit comfortably in my hand. I have small hands. I even had to buy my own separate controller for our PS2 because the standard PS2 controllers were too bulky and made my hands hurt. The other thing that turned me off of this player was the price. 300$ is a chunk of change for a portable music device that I could easily lose. I wanted to spend less than 200$. This meant that I had to look at players that sported less than 20 gig hard drives, which was fine by me. I didn’t need 20 gig of portable music on me at all times anyway. That’s when I started looking at the iPod.

The reviews of the iPod had some info in them that really turned me off. Shipping the entire unit back to Apple and paying 59$ to have the battery replaced when it started to flake out (and they do flake out after about a year) by Apple wasn’t something that made me happy. Especially since I’d been able to buy replacement lithium ion batteries for my cell phone ever since I bought my first one. This seemed like a raw deal designed only to get more money out of consumers on Apple’s part and in my opinion was a low blow. Especially since it was possible to design the device with a battery compartment that was separate from Apple’s precious DRM technology.

Since portability was important and video wasn’t something I was interested in, I looked at the iPod nano. At the time, Apple had just discontinued the mini, which might have been a great fit for me, but I wasn’t about to purchase one off eBay without a warranty. The iPod nano seemed like it would have been perfect. I carry small purses, the nano fits well with my need to carry impossibly tiny hand bags. I had nearly decided that I wanted one of these cute little devices when I started reading up on iTunes.

The iTunes software is proprietary. Good for it, I kind of figured on that. What I didn’t figure on was that I would have to suffer through software that was nearly as bad as Sony’s SonicStage for its line of digital media devices. No drag and drop file transfer, all transfer would be through iTunes only, and heaven forbid that I ever had a hard drive failure… if the hard drive on my laptop ever failed then I would lose every song I’d ever downloaded from iTunes and the minute I plugged my iPod into a computer with a newly installed iTunes, all of my music would go away. I don’t know that this is still true of iTunes, but it was at the time that I was looking at mp3 players. Every computer I have ever owned has had a major hard drive failure in the course of its life, including the one I am using now.

All of this is well and good, but there were three final strokes that explained to me that I just didn’t need an iPod. The first, was the audio-phile frequency ratings on the iPod and the zen micro. The zen micro has a wider frequency range than the iPod, which means better sound quality over all. The final stroke… is that iTunes does not sell Japanese Pop Music. I’ve looked through their catalog, I haven’t found Gackt or Hyde or Boom Boom Sattelites or any of the music that I listen to on a regular basis. So either way, I’m stuck importing CDs from Japan.

The last stroke was the price. My zen micro was 169$ for a 6 gig player. The 2 gig iPod nano is currently 179$.

Do the math.

I call bull****!

Since Sony’s press conference yesterday with regard to the PS3, every major news network on the planet has been reporting a delay in the release. The problem with this is, there is a delay, but not for the North American market. Sony never promised the North American release of the PS3 before November of this year. Not once, ever. I dare you to find an article to prove it.

Sony had announced that the PS3 would be ready for Japan “some time in late spring of 2006 with a worldwide release following it some time in the late fall.” If those aren’t the exact words of their statement, they are incredibly close. We weren’t going to see it before Christmas anyway.

Just had to share.

Real Rock.

When I think of the phrase “real rock” images of Bad Company, Stevie Ray Vaughn and The Rolling Stones come to mind. I think of the good old days of rock and roll that I can scarcely remember, but have a vivid mental picture of. The days when guys trotted up on outdoor stages to play for the benefit of undulating audiences who loved them above and beyond all sense of passion.

So when one of my local radio stations claims to be “Real Rock ” I expect to hear some honest to god, real rock and roll.

Unforunately, on more than one occassion, I’ve been denied.

The first time I paid attention to what they played after they said the phrase, I caught wind of a sound that was so distinctly Def Leppard that you couldn’t avoid it if the spandex and ripped jeans were a million miles away. It wasn’t even *good* Def Leppard. It was quite possibly the worst Def Leppard song to ever get airplay. F-f-foolin? Well you’re certainly not f-f-foolin’ me.

The second time, there was hope. I heard Ozzy. I don’t care what you say, Ozzy is real rock. At least… he is if you forget about that really bad period in the 80’s when he sang with Lita Ford and hosted Friday Night Videos with Dr. Ruth. The choice was the hideous “Shot in the Dark”, quite possibly the worst song Ozzy has ever loaned his talent to.

I finally gave up on the radio station’s promise of “real rock” today when the liner was followed by Great White’s “House of Broken Love”. While it does have a really cool guitar solo at the front, it’s 80’s hair rock at its core. It fails to pass the real rock test.

I’ve got a better shot of finding some real rock on my j-pop infested mp3 player.

I’m a liberal now.

Forget the fact that my blog has worn the “blogs for bush” button since… um… well at least the last election. I’ve never bothered to take it down. Forget that I voted for Bush not once, but twice, and am a fan of trickle-down economics. Forget that I thought Kerry and Gore were both full of crap, and blogged extensively on why I thought Kerry was in idiot in ‘04. Forget that I was brave enough to walk on a college campus in this country with a “Bush Cheney ‘04″ sticker stuck boldly to the back of my binder for everyone to see.

Forget all of that.

Because I disagreed with a conservative (several of them) in the comments on another blog, I am a “liberal”. My father, a card-carrying democrat, would heartily disagree and is highly disappointed that his daughter is a “right wing conservative nut-job”.

I’m not here to gripe about the guy that labeled me a liberal. I firmly put him in his place and I am sure he now feels like an idiot, as he should. That’s good enough for me. What I want to discuss, is this growing concern that I have for the dangerous practice of our society to categorize things in groups and apply all aspects of those categories to the people within it, regardless of whether those aspects are true or false.

I guess it is our lot in life, to be slapped with stickers that say that we are this or we are that. We are part of some stereotype that someone else doesn’t like because we disagreed with their ideas. If this is the way life is to be, then I guess I’m a liberal.

Personally, I think stereotypes are born of ignorance. How can you possibly define a human being using a single word? Attempting to do so is to ignore the other facets of the person and choose the one that fits your ideal of them for the time being. It paints a poor picture of who they are, and often is simply dead wrong. If all stereotypes were true, my pillows would be soaked with brylcream and I’d be picking pocket protectors up off the floors because my husband is a nerd. He doesn’t wear pocket protectors, nor does he use brylcream, but the stereotype says he should because of that label, so it must be the truth, right?

So many people have been wrong about me in so many ways, that I have formed a decidedly bad reaction to someone labeling me with any sort of name. I get mad. I think everyone should get mad when they are unfairly labeled. In my view, this is an honest reaction to being shoved into a category by someone who has no idea who you are. The person who gave you that label has taken a look at who you are based on some very skimpy evidence and has chosen your core values for you. The idea of someone passing judgment on you on such shaky ground is simply offensive. It’s only natural that we would get angry about it. This is a very shallow and unfair basis on which to judge a person.

This leads us to the question of what we can do to stop stereotyping. The answer to this is very simple, but it requires you to make a choice. Do the benefits of stereotyping outweigh the consequences? I leave that for you to decide and think about.