I haven’t bought music in two years. I did have a span where I would mail order some more obscure CDs from my ear-to-the-ground friends at Aquarius Records in San Francisco (thanks Jim and Andee!). I would also buy my classic CDs, Sam Cooke to The Stooges, from Amazon. I’d get the discs in the mail, load them into my server, and file them away for safe-keeping. It sounded better at full resolution, and overall was cheaper per CD, rather than $1 per song off of iTunes - $1, for a low quality mp3 that seamlessly loaded on my phone – I’ll do the extra steps thank you very much. I have never bought an mp3. Wait, I take that back – I did buy the mp3 version of “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus from Amazon a few years back, in a pinch. Remembe... read more >
This is the latest demo of my song ‘Leave It Alone’, which has been on the back-burner for a long time. It took two days for Producer Mike to pry it out of my hands and turn it into something I felt good about. I knew that there was a good song in there – it was always a favorite when I played it with my acoustic guitar. But as soon as I started mucking with a band feel, it almost always went cheesy…. at least I thought so. After some meandering in the drums and piano areas, I feel like I have made some peace with the song. Add the super-smooth backing double harmony vocals, panned left and right, and you’ve got a poor man’s Steely Dan. It also doesn't hurt that Garry Tallent from the E Street Band makes an appearance on bass.
read more >It was always funny to me that the labels sold people on 44.1kHz CDs because of them being quiet and indestructible - really they were neither - their noise just lives in another frequency band, and they get dinged up pretty easily. In reality, as you may or may not know, it was the $.07 vs $7 production cost delta, while keeping the retail price the same.... I think Netflix just learned the same lesson about providing their customers a lesser product at a higher price, while further confusing them with two sites for their services. Talk about the classic example of adding insult to injury - now, I am paying more to Amazon to watch a la carte. The difference between the music industry and Netflix, you ask? Netflix learned their lesso... read more >
