May 22, 2006
Bored With Chicks
I'm bored with the Dixie Chicks. I don't care for country music to begin with, so they never had any musical appeal for me. But most of the attention they get now is because they don't like President Bush. So they are on the cover of Time as far as I can tell because they are so mad at the President they don't care about their careers and they're gratuitously insulting other country music people: "I'd rather have a small following of really cool people who get it, who will grow with us as we grow and are fans for life, than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith," Maguire said. "We don't want those kinds of fans. They limit what you can do." OK, like companies that want better customers, the Chicks want better fans. Don't worry, my five-disc changer won't contaminate your CDs with Reba's or Toby's, and that's because I want those kinds of musicians because I don't want to limit myself to their kind of crappy music.
February 16, 2006
This Time ...
This time, it will be different: Amazon is working on a subscription based digital music service. The fact that Napster, RealNetworks and Yahoo! haven't had much with a subscription model doesn't deter Amazon.
August 8, 2005
Viva La Strawbs, Viva L'iTunes!
I'm a big fan of iTunes. I've been recreating my old music library song by song. Not everything is on iTunes (yet), but they keep adding to it. So there is a bit of a race between my failing memory and the additions, and this weekend the additions won a battle as a couple of Strawbs greatest hits albums are now available. Growing up my brother and I had Hero and Heroine in our collection (OK, I think it was in his part because I can't remember seeing it in a very long time). So once again I can hear Dave Cousins voice from yesteryear with such favorites as Lay Down or the un-Strawbs like but very fun Part of the Union til the day I die.
One of the great things is, especially as they add more of the old obscure music of my youth, I can buy exactly what I want. Some groups only had one or two good songs on an album, so now I can buy just those. The hard part is remembering the old obscure music of my youth.
