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New Music (and the Amazon MP3 store is dangerous)
By Andrew | September 28, 2008
Back when there were local music stores that used to have albums I wanted to listen to (as an aside, what do kids call albums these days?) I’d routinely go on binges and grab up to a dozen CDs at once. In the past 10 years, with the ready availability of MP3 players, massive amounts of hard drive space, and cheap, fast, bandwidth, those CDs would more often than not just get ripped to MP3 as soon as I got home and the physical media would just get sent straight to storage.
I could never get too into the iTunes Music Store. I hated the proprietary format, the DRM involved and being bound to iTunes, which, until the Remote App for the iPhone and Genius playlist generator was utter garbage. Even the new features barely make it tolerable.
Aaaanywho, the Amazon MP3 store is amazing. Just about everything I want is available in MP3 format, sans DRM, tagged appropriately, and in a high bitrate. Sure, you need a proprietary app to do the initial download of the mp3s, but once that’s installed, you can buy and listen to an album in under 5 minutes. It’s everything the consumer in me has been lusting after and my bank account has been fearing.
I grabbed two new albums tonight right after discovering the artists (instant gratification FTW). The first is an EP from Laura Barrett called Earth Sciences. Laura Barrett is a classically trained pianist from Toronto, but for her solo work she plays a Kalimba. The only way to describe her music is haunting. Apparently her song Robot Ponies went through the blogosphere a while back and I completely missed it. Here it is if you’re curious:
I discovered the second group through the excellent Aurgasm blog. Bitter:Sweet is a downtempo electronic duo from LA. The singer has an amazing voice and they’re much more informed by jazz than most trip-hop that I’ve heard. Their music has a swing to it that I’ve found lacking in other music in the genre. Here’s the title track off of their new album, Drama.
Topics: Articles | 2 Comments »
September 30th, 2008 at 6:28 am
(Caught your link. Thanks!)
Laura Barett sounds great; thanks for turning me on to her! Cheers.
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