Overload

This situation has been brewing for a while, but it has gone to a new level with the eMusic's addition of substantial holdings from Warner Brothers' catalog.

When I started out with eMusic they were still locked into independent labels only. When I came upon a band or artist that was new to me eMusic was usually my first stop on the chance they were not signed (or not yet signed) to a Major: when this was the case it was always a good moment; if I still had credits for the month I got to download new music right away. Instant gratification, hooray.

When the Majors started to show up in the form of Sony the stocks of recognizable content (for me) jumped sharply. I quickly found myself in the situation I alluded to previously: if I were to stick to just downloading the titles I've currently got listed in my "Saved for Later" file this would eat up my download quota for a full 9 months. The Replacements! Neil Young! Jimi Hendrix! Leo Kottke! Bob Dylan! It just keeps piling up. A not-insignificant percentage of these albums are things I once owned on cassette, or "sort of" owned... Well I remember the summer before my freshman year of college, when I massively recorded selections of my brothers even-then burgeoning LP vinyl collection, carefully decorating each tape with pictures cut out of magazines and my epic stack of college junk mail. No one had told me that I was "killing music" (and breaking the law!)

Not so long ago a major issue I faced with new music was simply hard drive space. I was limping along with an almost decade-old iMac, running my hard drive at a razor-thin margin of free space, aggressively culling out MP3 files and burning them to CDRs to preserve some modicum of function. With the advent of the new computer, these concerns vanished. I've got 22 days of continuous audio on iTunes, at just shy of 40 GB, which is around half my total current hard drive use, itself not even 20 percent of what I've got to spend. I'm not naive: I know what seems like an ever-loving Siberia of empty disk space will inevitably succumb to ever-burgeoning files and applications. But the era of music being the biggest wodge of disk space, the problematic app, seems over. I'm not the file-sharing type: I'm not going to celebrate all those tasty empty sectors by going on a freebie download spree. My modest consumption of eMusic and the occasional CD (sign of the times: my brother gave me a lovely Black Keys gatefold LP for Christmas: the right-hand gatefold contained the vinyl album... the left-hand gatefold contained the CD) will add a steady drip to that music folder. But the plain fact is that music, for me, is just not getting proportionally bigger. Oh, I could opt for larger, higher fidelity MP3s. But I just don't care. I am not an audiophile. I am much more that teenager who was thrilled with those cheap Radio Shack cassette rips of vinyl, made on my parents' ancient Sony Hi Fi. People bring up sampling rates as they debate the virtues of the various DRM-free music download outlets and I just don't care. I pay no attention.

Ironically, the bottleneck on my music consumption has, given my preference for the properly sanctioned download outlets, gone back to cost. My music budget is so: I download my eMusic tracks for the month, with a little cash left over for discretionary spending.

But in fact, at long last, the economics of downloading is starting to catch up with reality to the extent that if I'm being honest, I'm barely keeping up with all the new and old-to-me but new-to-digital offerings my modest budget allows. Even more ironic, what's really pushing me around decision-wise these days gets down to a matter of choices. Choices! Choices! If I recall it was a Physical Chemistry professor who first introduced me to the phrase "an embarrassment of riches." He was discussing some sort of painful and obtuse variety of calculation methodologies and the choice of phrase struck me at the time as deeply ironic. (Irony! It's so totally twenty-first century!) I think the current state of music availability is the first time in my life this phrase has occurred to me in a fully sincere way. There is so much music.

Example. Remember way back in paragraph two, when I spoke of the little spark of joy I felt when I came upon a coveted artist that turned out to be available on the indie-only eMusic? Oh how times have changed. A couple days ago I hit their interface, flummoxed again by how to discharge a dangling 4 song credits (I've mentioned before, I'm not a singles guy... and of course most of the one-hit-wonders on eMusic are now "album only" downloads). I check out the new arrivals. Holy hell, there are 243 pages of "freshly ripped" albums! I go to look at some higher level (i.e. more selective) listings of new stuff. And see that they now have the Talking Heads' catalog. My honest-to-God reaction to this is "Oh shit." More fodder for the saved for later file. I had them all in the day, to the last recorded to tape from my brother's LP collection... Remain in Light, Fear of Music, 77, More Songs About Buildings and Food, Speaking in Tongues. That's another two months of downloads! And I feel bad, I feel bad about neglecting the indies! What about new stuff, am I consigning myself to living in the past?!

Strange days. I am consuming a small stream of truly new music from various weird, independent sources - a topic I hope to get into in more detail in days to come. I really wonder about the market, these days, for truly committed-to-music newbies. There is of course still a major label system and all it has comprised for many decades. My real interest is in those stalwartly trying to forge their own way in the crazy, insanely overloaded marketplace of the new media. It isn't much of an insight to note that they are finding what market they find by making relationships, in that 2.0 sorta way, rather than the old models of radio play, of videos on MTV (that's right kids, once again, MTV used to be the Music Video channel). How are they getting by? Maybe I'll dust off Skype, give some interviews a shot. The times, they are a' changin'.