overlap

Ok, I'll own up that my days of having a finger on the pulse of any kind of contemporary cultural happening are limited to about three and a half weeks in 1986, but all the same I'm still somewhat surprised.

There is a single being released today that I would ordinarily be about to go and get from one of several record shops in my lunch hour - nice and easy, no problem. Instead I've been forced by the mechanics of the music industry to investigate downloading music as the single is not going to be buyable in any kind of tangible format.

On finding I'd no choice but to get down with the kids, daddio, I started looking at the variety of websites I could get the track from - and note that's track singular, now we've gone from the multi-formatting excesses of the late 1980s to the stark minimalism of nothing but a file stored on a hard drive somewhere, no b-side tracks, no cover art, the ultimate in disposable next-to-nothingness.

I'm no technophobe - I earn my living playing about with computers in various ways after all. And as with most technological developments, there's vast amounts of money to be made and lost, so I probably shouldn't be surprised to find a dozen different websites offering the track with limitations to various kinds of proprietary device or format, and they shouldn't be surprised that I just decided it was way too much flaming trouble.

All the same I refuse to miss out on music made by bands I love, and being no technophobe and having certain tools and equipment at my disposal, I'm confident I'll find a way around the problem. And that's another sale lost. That's the price of progress, I suppose.

// posted by uber @ 11:21 am