Wikipedia / Buying music as MP3s
Thursday, October 28th, 2010 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manWhen I was a child, if I asked about a subject my father didn't know about, he used to say "That's your project for the week: go away and look it up." And I never did, because it was too much of an effort. Now I suffered from encyclopaedia syndrome as much as the next geek, but only if the book was in my hands or across the room; heading to a library in such of arcane knowledge was too much of an effort.
That's why I love Wikipedia: it makes it so so easy to do that looking up of anything that isn't worth heading to a library for; and you (sometimes) learn such fascinating facts. One day you might read of Galante music, a style of music that bridged the transition from baroque to classical, that:
In other news, after I went to great lengths to buy back legal copies of all the music I'd copied off friends or recorded off the radio in my misspent youth, on CD, as MP3 was a lossy format; since then, when I've been after getting hold of an individual track, I've generally bought it as an MP3. MP3 quality is better now than it was a few years ago: I have two or three tracks in both formats, and I'm hard pushed to hear the difference with headphones on; through my twenty-four year old loudspeakers, forget it!
As the culmination of that process, I've just bought my first album in MP3 format. It was by a band (Kočani Orkestar) the one album by whom I previously possessed (L'Orient Est Rouge) I was a bit underwhelmed with. I'm not saying there were no good tracks on it, but having not got overall the satisfaction I felt the cost on CD justified, I was reluctant to take the risk this time, even after listening to 30" clips of every track on Amazon (as I also did last time). So I bought The Ravished Bride as an MP3 album for a considerably reduced price.*
* What, you want to know if I like it? Come back when I've listened to it a few times. And if you're wondering how I got into a Macedonian brass band, the answer's only a click away.
A former boss of Warner Music recently argued that the way to combat music piracy and drive sales up would be to reduce the price of an album to just £1. Other music bosses poured scorn on his idea:
Now, anyone for a poll on the meaning of "ravished"? ;^)
That's why I love Wikipedia: it makes it so so easy to do that looking up of anything that isn't worth heading to a library for; and you (sometimes) learn such fascinating facts. One day you might read of Galante music, a style of music that bridged the transition from baroque to classical, that:
The rejection of so much accumulated learning and formula in music is paralleled only by the rejection in the early 20th century of the entire structure of key relationships. Not every contemporary was delighted with this revolutionary simplification: Johann Samuel Petri, in his Anleitung zur Praktischen Musik (1782) spoke of the "great catastrophe in music".And the next day learn about the fractally complicated border between Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands and Baarle Hertog in Belgium, which features enclaves Dutch territory inside enclaves of Belgian territory themselves embedded inside the bulk of the Netherlands:
The border is so complicated that there are some houses that are divided between the two countries. There was a time when according to Dutch laws restaurants had to close earlier. For some restaurants on the border it meant that the clients simply had to change their tables to the Belgian side.
In other news, after I went to great lengths to buy back legal copies of all the music I'd copied off friends or recorded off the radio in my misspent youth, on CD, as MP3 was a lossy format; since then, when I've been after getting hold of an individual track, I've generally bought it as an MP3. MP3 quality is better now than it was a few years ago: I have two or three tracks in both formats, and I'm hard pushed to hear the difference with headphones on; through my twenty-four year old loudspeakers, forget it!
As the culmination of that process, I've just bought my first album in MP3 format. It was by a band (Kočani Orkestar) the one album by whom I previously possessed (L'Orient Est Rouge) I was a bit underwhelmed with. I'm not saying there were no good tracks on it, but having not got overall the satisfaction I felt the cost on CD justified, I was reluctant to take the risk this time, even after listening to 30" clips of every track on Amazon (as I also did last time). So I bought The Ravished Bride as an MP3 album for a considerably reduced price.*
* What, you want to know if I like it? Come back when I've listened to it a few times. And if you're wondering how I got into a Macedonian brass band, the answer's only a click away.
A former boss of Warner Music recently argued that the way to combat music piracy and drive sales up would be to reduce the price of an album to just £1. Other music bosses poured scorn on his idea:
"Right now if you buy a bottle of water it's £1," [Jonathan Shalit] said. "A piece of music is a valuable form of art. If you want the person to respect it and value it, it's got to cost them not a huge sum of money but a significant sum of money."But if my purchase of The Ravished Bride is anything to go by, Rob Dickins has got it bang-on right, and Jonathan Shalit is incapable of perceiving the paradigm shift Dickins is proposing.
Now, anyone for a poll on the meaning of "ravished"? ;^)
