New music obsession
Posted by: Mike
If a day goes by and I haven’t heard something new, I get fidgety. My ears wiggle like they’ve gone and got their own set of muscles and a nervous system. My arms start to ache and I start to see white spots in the shape of crochets and semi-quavers appear in front of my eyes. I get home from wherever I am and listlessly leaf through my CD collection trying to find something to satisfy my need. As if I’m going to find an unopened CD. I never do, I’ll put something on that I’m not interested in and fall into this depressive lull. I often collapse upon the floor only to be woken by the sound of the silence as the CD ends. Either that or my wife kicking me demanding to know why I’m lying on the kitchen floor. I have to listen to something new every day. It helps if I listen to a few new artists in a day — that way, I’m bound to find something cool — if I only listened to one track a day and it was shit, I’d be miserable all day.
So, I’m glad the internet exists. I can visit emusic, iTunes, mySpace and any number of other sites to get a fix. For me, emusic is one of the best ways of discovering music. They have lots of features like Member Playlists; emusic members can create a playlist, so you can checkout the music that other people like. Then they have “Related Artists” which are similar artists, or artists that have links to the band of the album you’re looking at. Then they have fans, which is similar to a “Other People downloaded these also” kind of feature. They also have “editors picks” and “Discovery” which is the emusic magazine.
It’s a subscription service and that suits me, you can get more for your money that way - but the tracks are DRM free and you own them forever, unlike Napster and Yahoo. The biggest downside is their catalogue, while diverse, doesn’t really cover the mainstream charts. Or even the semi-mainstream. But there is some properly obscure stuff on there “Ziltiod the Omniscient” by Devin Townsend was one such obscure album I downloaded. Having said that, they do occasionally get an A list artist on there. I recently downloaded the new Paul McCartney album, “Memory Almost Full” (it’s awesome by the way) and Bjorks most recent offering.
Discovering new music nowadays is so easy, there are so many ways to listen to new artists that there really isn’t any excuse for NOT doing it. If you do one thing today, find a new artists you like from one of the many websites out there.
