An embarrassing confession – two of my finest music finds weren’t from the coolest sources. After seeing Shrek I found out about the brilliant Jeff Buckley, as a cover of his song ‘Hallelujah’ was used in the film, and I found out about my favourite band Elbow from a Rathergood animation of northern kittens singing the Destiny’s Child song Independent Woman.
I’ve since made countless new finds through the Internet, and it’s getting easier all the time to find good music. Pandora is still churning out superb music for free, Last.fm is like the Flickr of music, and the Download.com music site has some brilliant finds and a great newsletter. Also, eMusic.com has some good stuff, and is worth a basic membership even after you’ve taken advantage of the trial that gives you 50 free MP3s - although admittedly it can be hard to find good music amongst a lot of filler. The best album I found on eMusic so far is the brilliantly catchy Twin Cinema by the New Pornographers.
The single best thing about eMusic.com is that you download MP3 format music files legally from the site. My MP3 player, unlike the iPod, doesn’t support DRM (Digital Rights Management) protected music, so I can’t put music on it unless it has all DRM protection removed, which means that when I buy anything with DRM protection (such as music from iTunes, MSN Music or Napster), I have to burn it to a CD, then rip the CD into MP3 format just to put it on my MP3 player. DRM is a pain in the neck, because even though it is there to protect recording artists and record company revenues by preventing unauthorised copying, its main effect is to inconvenience music lovers. If you want to rip and redistribute music illegally it’s perfectly easy to do - all DRM does is put a small obstacle in the way of that. Sony has already been publicly reprimanded for attempting to protect their CD format music with rootkits, software programs that invisibly installed themselves onto the computers of anyone who tried to rip the music from them. The rootkits left computers vulnerable to attack from other malicious software. Sony’s DRM software has long left something to be desired anyway – I gave up using Sony devices like their Network Walkman because their SonicStage software was confusing, obstructive and impractical – creating duplicates of media files, wasting computer memory, and being overly prescriptive about how you could manage your music.
It’s well known that music is available illegally for free using software like LimeWire, but since I started downloading music from the Internet, I’ve spent more on music than I ever had before. I still like to buy CDs, and I buy music online as well, but when I do, I expect to be able to do with it as I please. Not everyone has, or wants, an iPod.
Update: I’m clearly not the only one that feels this way!
Possibly related posts:
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Nick
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