It’s hard to underestimate the impact that stores like CD World had on my music tastes. For someone who wasn’t rich, but had a decent chunk of disposable income (thanks to the various jobs I worked) and free time on his hands, these stores were a great way to explore new music cheaply. The fact that they had listening stations meant that you didn’t have to buy albums blind – the healthy supply of used CDs and cutouts likewise encouraged musical experimentation. They also stocked tons of imports in an era before it was easy to buy them online, which, given my musical tastes, was fantastic. “Going CD shopping” was a legitimate way to spend an afternoon, because you could really spend time listening to the music and debating its merits with your fellow audiophiles. The music-buying experience at your average big-box retailer is geared towards letting you find exactly what you were looking for, and then getting you to buy other stuff at the store too, to justify the loss-leader CD that you bought. Music is grudgingly accepted as part of their business model – a necessary evil, unlike the record store where music is it’s raison d’être.

The experience was friendlier and more “social,” in a way, than even my later experiences in other music stores, ones with much bigger street cred and stock like Amoeba. Amoeba’s problem is that their stores are perfect for the übernerd who knows exactly what they want – Amoeba’s selection is legendary, and it is generally well-organized and well-maintained – but terrible for someone who’s just looking to explore on their own. The lack of listening stations really dampens my interest in just “going to Amoeba” for the heck of it – I can wander around and flip through the racks for hours, but I’m much less likely to actually buy new stuff (that is, from bands that I am unfamiliar with) unless I can listen to it, or it’s in the bargain bin.

Strangely, for a time even one of the bigger players in the music market understood my concerns. I remember the old Blockbuster Music that I used to go to (formerly Sound Warehouse) had a rather impressive rack of listening stations, manned by a store employee. (One nice thing about Blockbuster in this regard was that their listening stations were well-kept, the headphones were in good condition, and the headphone jacks weren’t always busted, in stark contrast to many of the indie stores. There was also never a wait to use the listening stations, because they had way more CD players than I ever saw customers in the store.) The prices there fell into the “fairly-to-ridiculously high” category (which would eventually doom music retailers like Blockbuster, Sam Goody and Tower Records), but at the very least they understood that providing this atmosphere could encourage people to spend more time in their store, and, sooner or later, buy more stuff.

It’s hard to imagine these kinds of stores ever making a comeback. “Going music shopping” sounds like an anachronism now – with portable digital music players becoming ubiquitous, it’s actually more work for someone to buy a CD and then listen to it on their MP3 player. The artistic significance of albums is gone – consumers frame the music buying discussion in terms of “why should I pay money for the songs I don’t like?”, as if it would make sense to just buy and watch movie trailers since “they contain all the best parts anyway.” It seems that most non-dying CD stores are either downsizing (and trying to subsist on true specialty items alone), or becoming one of a thousand flea market merchants on eBay. Even the infamous Bill’s in Dallas (home of the “no price tags” haggle system/tax dodge) relocated to smaller digs and Internet sales. It’s sort of strange that, on the one hand, the Internet (or digital distribution) has really crushed the traditional CD store model, but on the other hand, it is providing a way for them to survive (and a more “efficient” market for consumers). When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Change is the only constant.

In the meantime, I’ll shed a tear in remembrance of a lot of “wasted” afternoons browsing the racks at CD World.

Fast forward to this year, and you’ll find that the format is just about extinct. You can’t even find them in music stores anymore, and even the major UK retailers have stopped stocking them. Over there, the format underwent a precipitous 90% decline in unit sales from 1999 to 2007, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see similar figures for the US.

I can’t help but feel a bit sad about this — I consider the CD single an integral part of my education as a popular music fan and collector. (One of the most important lessons learned: the b-sides for singles from a band’s first album are almost always the best they will ever release. Why? Well, by the time they get around to recording an album, they tend to have a large repertoire of songs laying around. For later albums, they don’t have that backlog to rely on.) Another concern is whether or not "official" remixes will die out — part of their raison d’être was to fill out singles.

I feel like the industry had a hand in killing the CD single format — the move to multi-part singles and the reduction in the number of tracks (partly to satisfy chart rules) smacked of greed. While it didn’t stop me from buying them, I’m sure that the consumer market as a whole got tired of it. Three part singles were the absolute nadir of this phenomenon, though thankfully they were short-lived.

My feelings echo many of the commenters in this thread. There’s just something different about clicking on a link and downloading an MP3 — granted, I am coming around to the idea given the convenience of having my music library instantly accessible, but only grudgingly so. Coming soon: a screed regarding the practice of buying just one or two songs from an album instead of the whole thing…

It sounded like he was winded or short of breath at times, which was not good — what’s worse is that he actually said something along the lines of, "Well, I’m not as tired now as I was at the show a couple of days ago!" While it may be overly dramatic to say that time has not been kind to his body, he has clearly put on some weight (and he was a pretty big guy when I first saw him live 13 years ago), and I have to wonder if that is affecting his performing ability. I should also note that his sartorial choice of a mesh-back hat did not add to my estimation of his health.

There’s also an interesting interview in Performing Songwriter with him, talking a bit about his career, The Thorns, his cover record, his fear of flying, and his new hobby of pottery. (For the record, there was no pottery for sale at this show, so I can’t pass judgment on it.) It’s sort of interesting that he acknowledges the changes that have taken place in the music sales landscape in the last few years, and how they will probably allow him (an artist who’s moderately well known) to succeed modestly on his own terms. At the same time, though, he mentions that one of the reasons he signed with his new label is that they do artist development — this seems strange to me, because after 20-something years of producing music, you’d think that you would already have your market and fanbase pretty well defined. An anecdote in support of this idea: I was probably one of five or six people at the show who were under the age of 30 — there probably aren’t too many new Matthew Sweet fans out there, even if he did have a track in Guitar Hero II…

Also, his long-time drummer Ric Menck looks like he stepped off the set of The Planet of the Apes — with sunglasses and a hat on, he really looked like an ape. Pretty crazy.

My brother had suggested just using another hard drive or some sort of NAS, but that solution can still suffer from hardware failure (depending on how much money you spend, and I am not looking to spend a lot). I wanted some redundancy, and the ability to have an off-site backup. However, the thought of having to push 45 GB of data upstream to the Internet is unappealing — that, plus the fact that storage service sites would cost about $60/year minimum, made me look elsewhere. This is music I’m interested in backing up — not anything mission critical, and not necessarily something I need remote access to, but at the same time something that I do want to be backed up.

Eventually I decided on simply burning DVD sets, and sending one set to my brother to act as my off-site backup. I looked around a little bit for any sort of application that could help in this regard — however, searching for "DVD backup" on Google just returns a ton of results of products for "backing up your video DVD collection." Sourceforge‘s backup section is a somewhat barren wasteland with no clear indication of tried-and-true solutions that would do exactly what I wanted. The backup utility included in XP doesn’t really deal with the type of backup I wanted (splitting files across removable non-tape media), and I don’t have a tape drive to use with it either. I eventually just rolled up my sleeves and split the collection manually, burning DVDs with the copy of Nero that I got with my DVD drive.

Unfortunately, while Nero claims that it clears the archive bit from files written to a CD, this doesn’t appear to be the case. This will make future "incremental" updates more difficult for me to manage — I’ll have to figure out some kind of strategy for dealing with this. (This may result in me writing some custom software to handle exactly what I want…yeesh!)

This backup strategy will be augmented with file synching to another computer we have, probably using the Sync PowerToy. I haven’t set this up yet, but it looks like it should be fairly straightforward.

The encoding used the –vbr-new and -V2 settings on LAME (via Exact Audio Copy, which was used to rip the CDs) — the goal is to produce something that I can listen to, in a reasonable amount of disk space, not to produce archival-quality stuff.

The majority of the bad reads came from CDs that are more than 10 years old, so if you have any rare old stuff that you’d like to keep, I’d recommend ripping it sooner rather than later. One of the bad reads came from a CD that was stored in an open CD carrier thing (which straps onto a car sun shade) — not sure if it was because of it being exposed, overheated, or what, but the CD carrier seems suspect.

Here are some interesting things that I discovered or rediscovered during the project:

• A promo copy of the Trash Can Sinatras’ Cake from KHIB, which is apparently now a religious radio station.
• Two cases where there was a duplicate copy of the tray card under the CD jewel (Idlewild’s 100 Broken Windows and the single for the Bluetones’ Sleazy Bed Track).
• Lyrics to the Bill album, on the back of the tray card for I Am An Elastic Firecracker by Tripping Daisy.
• The Original Soundtrack Recording for Secret Weapons Over Normandy — AKA one of the last things Michael Giacchino did before the score for The Incredibles (AKA becoming rich and famous). Surprisingly, the track data for this was already on FreeDB.
• Most people (including me) ignore the "omit the" naming rule on FreeDB. My rationale is that by omitting "The", information is actually lost when CDs are catalogued. Some unsuspecting person might think that Editors are actually "The Editors"!

  The presumed rationale for omitting "the" is that it prevents names from getting bunched up in the "T" section. My opinion is that this issue should be solved in the UI of a playback application, not by simply omitting data. (Perhaps it could be omitted from the folder name, but not the ID3 tag. However, this would require either automated support from a ripping program, or a better UI in the ripping program for allowing these changes. I don’t think this problem is important enough that anybody will really try to solve it…)

• Some of the really silly Genre presets in EAC are actually Winamp extensions to the ID3v1 genre list. I now know who to blame for the ridiculousness of Primus having their own genre…

As it turns out, there is. Seth Golub has a nice illustrated example of an easy way to remove jewel case trays. In short, you simply hold the jewel case from underneath, near the hinge, and flex the edges downwards (while pressing up from underneath the middle of the hinge). The tray will inevitably pop out, enabling you to easily access the back cover art (and, in the case of my copy of Kid A, the hidden booklet from the first pressing). This can be done very quickly, and with less time variation than prying the tray up (several CD cases were very stubborn in this regard, and required a couple of minutes to dislodge the tray).

I imagine this trick is probably common knowledge in record stores across the world, but it was new to me.

Now, I am hardly a paragon of cool, but let me put it this way — freebie t-shirts for games sit at the back of my drawer, and are worn a) on lazy days when I don’t leave the house, b) to the gym, or c) when I’m doing any sort of messy work. I wouldn’t wear them out to a show…it would be too weird.

"If kids are sitting up all night smoking super skunk [cannabis] and they come so desensitised to crime because they’re playing these videogames, it’s really, really scary."

* "sudden expertism" being a bit of Ticket lingo describing people who insist that they are an authority on any subject you care to bring up.

The content of the magazine is, well, pretty bad.

When you have a magazine that devotes half a page to this “poet” (anchored by a really terrible photograph of generic white indie dude with glasses performing a hadouken), you have some serious problems. The “poetry” produced by this gentleman has a striking resemblance to the dialogue of the Orz from Star Control — the crucial difference is that the dialogue of the Orz happened to be attached to a really fun game, whereas the page of “Reveler @ Eyelevel” merely has a ton of broken links under the “*And who wrote these riots?*” heading. Shtick does not equal substance, although I suppose it can get you your 15 minutes.

The overall aim of the magazine appears to be to supply busy or indecisive people with cultural sound bites to be dispensed at cocktail parties. The neatly-summarized “for fans of” in article summaries provides the easily-swayed with not only something to be purchased, but another name to be dropped into a “what does XYZ sound like?” or “what are you listening to/watching/reading?” conversation. The ordained soundtrack of the New Yorker crowd right now includes folk, singer/songwriter, electronic, and “accessible” rap and hip-hop — accordingly, the pages of Paste are filled to the brim with not simply reviews and advertising for such, but breathlessly-worded justifications for their superiority and importance. This article, and the rest of the hilarious Stuff White People Like site, is a pretty good summary of the Paste mentality.

I think my decline in interest in following music really accelerated around the time when I saw the term “electro booty” used in an article to describe a genre of music. “Electro booty” is the taxonomic equivalent of undocumentation — a phrase that is so meaningless as to be completely useless as a descriptor. When something has been dissected into such meaningless classifications (or classifications meaningful only to a select few), people have lost sight of the most important distinction in music (or, about anything, really) that really matters: whether or not it’s any good, and whether or not you $*&!ing like it. Needless to say, Paste often wallows in this genre-based navel gazing — recitations of a set of adjectives and artist names associated with each particular micro-genre, with no noteworthy commentary or insight.

So, at the end of the day, what I’m really left with is a monthly sampler CD that I can stick into my computer and enjoy for a little while. Not bad (particularly for the price of “free”), but certainly not what it could be. Still, thanks, Ray!*

(* I feel compelled to spell this out, because otherwise, my brother will think that I’m ripping on him or his music tastes when that’s really not the case. He still bears psychic scars from when I mockingly asked him if he cried when he listened to a certain emo band…)