The Living Rockumentary

My brother, Norbert, just sent me a link to listen.com. They are offering a service very much like the one Tony, Andreas, and I were discussing in Your Own Rockumentary. There's a free trial period and then after that at a membership fee of 10 bucks a month you will have unlimited access to 20,000 albums over the internet. Full albums or single tracks of CD-Quality. You can download them from any computer, and for an additional .40 cents per track you can burn them to cd. There wouldn't be that much need to burn them since you can access them from any internet connection, and we all know that internet connections will be everywhere soon.

Those of you who think the concept of an album as something you can hold in your hands is going to last much longer, might want to rethink it. I love albums and their length and size and artwork, but I think efficiency usually wins out in these situations. Perhaps albums like we know them will exist for special collectors but the music world as we know it REALLY IS going to change drastically really soon, it already is.

One thing that they don' t get into on the website, of course, is how artists are going to collect on this. Maybe it'll be a percentage based on download quantity. Maybe artists should start right now setting up massive super download sites (before the loophole is fixed) in which they download their tracks over and over again thus pushing them up the charts resulting in more downloads equaling more money or atleast more listens. Or, maybe the artists won' t be seeing any of the revenue at all. I don't know and I don't feel like looking into it. Anybody else want to?

My other brother, Alvin, said once, while we were at a french restaurant and we ordered a very non-traditional version of a dessert resulting in the waiter's hesitance, "Don't fight the future."