[meme] Day 25. A song that makes you laugh

Okay, since I've posted Stump's "Buffalo" a number of times, I bring you a song that makes me laugh, partly because it pops into my head at the most inopportune moments:

The sad thing is that I can quote this song on the fly. :p

[meme] Day 26. A song that you can play on an instrument

Well, since I've actually been in a few bands (okay, so we never played out, but hey--it was fun), I know a good number of songs, so just for fun:

First guitar solo learned: Tears for Fears' "Shout"
First song I taught myself on piano, John Lennon's "Love"
Song I know how to play best on air drums: Rush's "Tom Sawyer"
Song The Flying Bohemians covered, to very amusing effect: Guns n' Roses' "Used to Love Her"
Song I'd love to recreate live with real instruments: MARRS' "Pump Up the Volume"
Song I'd love to do live to blow people's minds (okay, the ones my age who know this song at any rate): The Bee Gees' "Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You"


And for an embed: a song I never get sick of playing on the bass:

I never noticed just how cool John Paul Jones was of a bass player until I heard this song. Simple yet a hell of a lot of fun to play. In fact, I learned a lot of bass playing as a young kid by playing along with the first Led Zepplin album.

[RTS] Whither CDs?

CNN had an interesting article wondering just how long the compact disc format will last. Of course I couldn't let that article go by without my two cents in an RTS post. ;)


CDs didn't arrive in my collection until 1989, after I graduated high school, and the first cd I bought was of course The Beatles' Revolver, one of my then all-time favorite albums. [Fun Fact--the second cd I ever bought was the Young Einstein soundtrack!]. I knew they'd been around since the early 80s (1982, the article says), but they never really blasted off until later in the decade. I think part of that was due to the fact that radios with cd players were still quite expensive at the time, at least a hundred or so dollars and upwards, depending on the size and what else was included. Added to the fact that a lot of audiophiles didn't buy those radios, instead buying the cd player component to add to their multimedia setup. Me, I bought a $200 radio that year that had radio tuner, a cd player and a dual tape deck, basically because I'm a music nerd that needed to use such things for dubbing purposes. There was also the fact that the price was higher than a cassette, something I was quite big on at the time. Thirdly, I was kind of frustrated by the fact that some albums had 'bonus tracks' that were only available on cd--such as Wire's It's Beginning To and Back Again, in which one of the bonus cuts was actually the second single off the album (and, in retrospect, a much better song than the first single). Sure, cassettes often had the bonus tracks, but the CD was one better. Fourthly...I just couldn't really hear the difference between the quality, other than the cassette having the tape hiss and vinyl having surface noise. The sound of music on CD felt kind of...naked, in a way.

All that aside, I grew to enjoy cds in their own way--the packaging, the ease of finding a track, and so on--but it really wasn't until the mid to late 90s, right about when I started at the record store, that I really started collecting in that format. To me it was still the price--it felt a bit much to spend upwards of $15 for an album that I could get for $10 on cassette with little to no difference between the two. Even in the used stores that I would frequent, I could buy a boatload of dollar cassettes instead five or six cds for the same amount. Of course, once I started at the record store (and after I left, when I frequented Newbury Comics), my cd collection grew exponentially. With HMV it was in part due to the handful of promos sent to us on a weekly basis, and part due to the discount. And with Newbury...well, let's just say they really do live up to their "wicked cheap" logo. ;)

By 2003, when I finally owned a computer with enough memory on it, all that changed. Once I realized how much space I had on the hard drive, I decided to start ripping my collection to put on my PC. This wasn't just cds, though...I realized I could also connect one of my radios via the mic jack to the PC and make cassette rips as well. Not only was it easier to listen to during my writing sessions, I could also rip songs I liked from half-baked albums and later resell them to used record stores.

When Emm and I moved out to San Francisco in 2005, all that changed. Thanks to my PC and an external hard drive, I was able to rip a goodly amount of music and get rid of the rest. That was a definitely a move I wouldn't have even entertained a few years previous, but given that we'd have a finite amount of space in the apartment, I figure I'd better get rid of a few.

The funny thing now is that our cd collection is now hiding in a few boxes in the closet of Spare Oom, instead of proudly displayed somewhere on a bookshelf or somesuch. Our entire music collection is now stored on two external hard drives, the primary copies of the tracks on my PC, where I can get to them easily. I play everything currently on the Windows Media Player (whilst I wait for an upgrade of Media Monkey that won't bork out my PC in the process). I mostly download now, but I still do buy cds every now and again, mostly from Amoeba over in the Haight, and at Newbury when we visit New England.


All that said...


Do I think CDs are going the way of the buffalo?

Honestly? I'm not sure. I don't think so. They're definitely not going to disappear outright like 8-track tapes. Vinyl is still around, as are cassettes, but in much lower numbers. There will always be a family out there who isn't tech-savvy and has no real reason to go online, and continues to enjoy listening to the radio and the cassettes and cds. There will always be some place for them, at least in the immediate future.

However, I do believe that the music industry will definitely need to rethink a lot of what they've been doing over the course of the last few decades if they want to keep profiting off it. The price of CDs has always been an issue--sure, there's the cost of production, packaging, and so on--but really? Nearly twenty bucks for an album after all this time? Especially when smaller DIY labels and indie stores are doing it so much cheaper? Unless they seriously rethink their profit margin, the consumption of cds is definitely going to keep declining. Especially when you can download the same album, sometimes with non-physical-copy bonus cds, for much cheaper online, at a variety of places. Some labels are even adding a free pdf of the packaging for the collector in us.

It's all about how to sell music, really. I posted about the rise-fall-comeback-noncomeback of singles a few times already, and I still think that though they were prematurely phased out in the mid-90s, it was probably for the best, given the mood of the music scenes. The late 90s saw quite a bit of album sales, whereas the singles didn't quite cut it anymore, as they'd apparently outlived their usefulness. And for the most part, the music industry, for all the good they may do in promotion and generating hype, never quite grasped each consumer mood change that came along--they always seemed about six months or so behind.

To put it bluntly, the life of the cd isn't going to be anywhere near as huge as it was ten to fifteen years ago, mainly due to the internet. Getting music online is currently the ultimate in convenience--sampling songs before you buy, downloading just the one song instead of a handful, much easier storage, I could go on--and it's tough to compete against that. No amount of special tchotchkes and limited editions are going to change that, at least not right now. That's partially why the RIAA is so against online music--they don't know what to do with it.

Still...as said, I still see vinyl, because there are the collectors out there, and the deejays. There are still cassettes out there--even the blank ones you can still buy at your local Walgreens. The same remains for the cd, because it's become so ingrained. They just won't be as huge as they once were.