The Musical Albatross
Posted on | August 19, 2008 at 6:56 am | 3 Comments
Pet Peeve of the Day: Too much good music to listen to.
Boo hoo! Cry for me! Cry for the whiny little baby! I have too much music! I’m not buying very many CDs anymore – heck, I’ve only bought nine in 2008 so far, and five of those were Kayak CDs. No, the problem is eMusic. When they revamped their pricing plans awhile ago, I got grandfathered into a plan that allows me to download 90 tracks a month, for which I pay $19.99 per month. That’s a little over 22 cents a track. You can’t beat that. The best plan they have these days is 75 downloads for $19.99, or about 27 cents a track.
But really, the only time I have to listen to music these days is the commute to and from work. At home, I’m too busy watching TV, watching DVDs, playing videogames, and stuff like that (not to mention writing blog entries) to listen to music. I could listen at work, but I have to be in right frame of mind for that, which I haven’t been lately. So the upshot is that pretty much all the music listening I do lately is just to keep up with my monthly eMusic downloads. Even so, I’m a month or two behind on those.
When I’m only listening to new music, and frequently only listening to an album once, it really changes the music listening experience that I’ve grown used to over the years. I’m unable to form attachments to albums like I used to. I rarely just play something because I want to hear it again, even though there are lots of albums I’ve downloaded that I really want to hear again because I know from first listen that I’ll bond with them.
I’ve thought about getting rid of my eMusic subscription, but then I wouldn’t be listening to any new music at all. And I really, really like to keep up with new stuff. It’s probably possible to downgrade my subscription, but I don’t want to lose this great deal I have. I’ve got close to 250 albums in my “Save for Later” lists, so I’ll probably never run out of stuff to download. eMusic is doing pretty good lately with acquiring new stuff, so my monthly downloads frequently don’t even dip into albums released before the current month. Those “save” lists aren’t shrinking.
I do sometimes ending up downloading albums based on friends’ recommendations or short song samples, that I end up not caring for. But surprisingly, around 75% of the albums I download end up on my “would like to listen to again” list. So that’s a pretty good ratio. Again, that makes it hard to give up or downgrade the subscription.
I guess the solution is I just need to force myself to listen more often. I do also listen while I’m jogging, though I don’t jog as much as I used to. And when I do, I prefer listening to random fast-paced songs from my entire iTunes library rather than to fixed albums. Although I sometimes will do that if I’m behind in my new music listening. And I should learn to turn on the music when I’m doing household chores or composing blog entries or whatever, but I find in my old age that any sort of divided concentration can be a bad thing and will make tasks take longer than they should. Time is at a premium!
Ah… the perils of the 21st Century… too much information to process… shutting down…
Latre.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “people who don’t believe in god are lost?”. (I like how the person isn’t quite sure…)
Comments
3 Responses to “The Musical Albatross”
August 19th, 2008 @ 11:00 am
I was grandfathered into the 40 downloads for $10 plan, which is good, because sometimes a month or two will go by when I don’t DL anything at all, and I still feel OK about it, because the next month I might use them all and discover something fantastic. I don’t DL anything unless I really want it. As a result, I never feel overwhelmed. One trick I’ve used: sometimes listening to my playlist on shuffle, which leads to rediscovering things I might have given short shrift to initially.
August 19th, 2008 @ 3:15 pm
I don’t DL anything unless I really want it. As a result, I never feel overwhelmed.
Ack! I could never do that. I need to feel I’m getting my money’s worth. I don’t want to throw away any part of that $20/mo, even if I’m essentially wasting it by downloading something I’ll never listen to again. Like you say, you never know when you might find that hidden gem.
One trick I’ve used: sometimes listening to my playlist on shuffle, which leads to rediscovering things I might have given short shrift to initially.
Yeah, that’s one thing the random jogging playlist is good for. I have my alarm clock iPod set to shuffle also, so sometimes I’ll hear new songs that way. Sometimes it will even be the first time I’ve heard something.
August 20th, 2008 @ 11:51 am
I’ve long been able to only ever really listen to music while driving. Just not enough time. I think my next blog post needs to be about ePressure – the need to keep up with Netflix, mp3s, eBooks, etc. Aaaaagghhh!!!!!!