Kill Rock Stars

We’re headed down to the Java House tonight. There’s been some signs of students back in town. Bless those students. They don’t run this town, but they make this town run. I’ve got the computer on “mix” tonight — listening to random songs from my collection. It’s pretty much habit now: when I buy a new CD, the second thing I do is rip it onto my hard drive. I spend enough time on this thing to want a fairly decent selection of music while I’m working. I’m totally getting my money out of my emusic.com subscription. I’ve downloaded something like 8 gigs of music from them so far.

It’s great having some surprises when we’re listening to music. There was a point, when I had about 2,000 songs on my hard drive, when I knew every single song, and likewise there weren’t any real surprises. That’s the great thing about radio (when the stations are good) — surprise. It keeps me fresh when I can listen to new stuff that I haven’t heard before. So in recent months my music selection here has expanded thanks to the emusic site mostly, because now I’ve got something on the order of 5,000+ songs on my hard drive, and the surprises now abound. I figure I’ll probably cut off the emusic for a while. I’ve downloaded so much I haven’t had a chance to listen to it all yet. That’s the cool thing about emusic — you can download an entire album at a clip and it’s all MP3 files so you can burn them to CD for no extra charge.

After being initially skeptical of emusic for some months, I’ve joined and rather warmed up to the service. For a lot of people, they won’t have much music they’re looking for, but for me, there’s tons of stuff on there that I’m enjoying.

Buying music online seems to be pretty effective. You miss out on the packaging — it would be nice if you could download a scan of the cover art — but otherwise it’s a great way to get a hold of new music. It’s especially great when record labels are willing to share tracks with their customers. Kill Rock Stars of Olympia is especially aggressive in this area with dozens and dozens of songs available.