Music of Your Life;)

[captainsblog]

We caught up with Portlandia tonight. The penultimate episode made fun of the current mishmash of digital music options, as Not Fred (Fred) and Not Carrie (Carrie) demo'd their newest and coolest-retro form of music: The One CD You've Had In Your Car for the Last 10 Years. Just one problem: they did it standing in front of a Smart Car. As Iggy made clear to us from day one, and the episode made clear in time: Smart Cars don't have CD players.  You need to USB an mp3 player, or run an iPhone through its headphone jack. My latter device, oddly, doesn't play as well with Iggy's brain as Eleanor's Zenstone does.

The episode did highlight how our musical media have changed.  I've written here before about how complex a process it is to move music from the iTunes Library on a dead PC to a brand-new one.  Atop that, add new purchases. Amazon has become my go-to for this process, because of the Joy of Auto-Rip.

Overall, we prefer the physical of digical- an actual "album" with liner notes and lyrics and credits.  They're smaller than the vinyls of 30 years ago, but they're nothing a good lamp and sometimes a magnifying glass can't handle.  Some iTunes purchases simulate this with an extra download of a "digital booklet," but they're relatively uncommon. But Amazon's solution for most new material is perfect for us: their mobile-slash-PC app instantly "auto-rips" mp3s of the music to all of our available platforms where their software is loaded, at 00:00:00 on the day of its official release (or of the purchase, if later), while the actual physical CD gets shipped and arrives, with art and lyrics and all the things, a week or so later for no additional cost.

Thus it's been our pleasure to hear the entirety of Lake Street Dive's  new Side Pony album, through our living room speakers via my iPhone, on this the day of its official release. The actual Nonesuch-label recording of it should be here by next weekend, in the popular new compact disc format.

Best of both.  I'm sure some artists would prefer we use Bandcamp, or CDBaby, or their own website- but the Big Boys don't have a monopoly on the marketing concept, so nothing's stopping them from making their music just as accessible through less capitalist sites.

Also, the album is great. Check with me next weekend about the artwork and how legible the lyrics are;)

Comments

[shadowhuntress.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, I had no idea Lake Street Dive was releasing a new album! Glad to hear it's good.