Spotify..."Winning!"

"1956, when the DJ broke to play us something new
Hearts broke, hearts skipped, and we knew that this made for me and you
When he told us he was lonely he was speaking from the heart
I was much to young to know but I knew it was a start

I was raised on the radio
Raised on the radio
Just an all-american boy
I found my favorite toy"

-Ravyns

Soooo…Terrestrial radio is dead.  You have NPR, Angry Talk Radio and Sports Radio.  Sure, there is still KSHE for classic rock and JOY (whatever) for Jesus Music and 4 country stations (which all suck) but other than Spotify (which should be discussed later) there is nothing for music lovers on Radio.  

“Radio is a sound salvation

Radio is cleaning up the nation

They say you better listen to the voice of reason

But they don't give you any choice

'cause they think that it's treason.

So you had better do as you are told.

You better listen to the radio.”-

-Elvis Costello

Maybe at one time.

Last Christmas I bucked up for Spotify.  $9.99 a month as part of my move to the future.  

Getting rid of CDs and freeing myself up from the tyranny and poor navigability of iTunes.  I had been on Spotify’s free service for several years and got used to it but the ads and the sometimes low quality of the stream (I think it is supposed to be same as the premium but that was not my experience) but I have to tell you that I am pretty much done with all my old sources of music.  The CD’s continue to move towards the used record store and I have not purchased anything from iTunes in a year.

Bob Lefsetz...the Sage of Santa Monica has been promoting Spotify for a long time, to the point of being accused of taking $$$ from them (which he denied).  He points out again and again that people keep trying to get into the streaming industry to compete seem to sputter.  I know some of you still use Pandora (a great Presidential Cantidate would just say “SAD”) and I have never met anyone who has used iTunes streaming service.  Here is a short list of some the services which are or have been in existence:

• Last.fm
• Amazon Music
• TuneIn Radio
• Radio.com
• Tidal
• Slacker
• Google
• IHeartRadio
• Spotify
• Rhapsody
• iTunes Radio

Here is a really good article comparing the value and usability and value of the current services.

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/best-music-streaming-service/

I do not know a great deal about any of them.  I am an Amazon Prime Member and I guess I should familiarize myself with the product which is cheaper but it would also require me messing with the family account and that is...above my pay grade.  I was an early adopter of Pandora and I enjoyed it but it just didnt have the freedom and function of Spotify.  

So what is so great.  Well, for one you have like 85% of all popular music ever released.  Maybe that is anover estimate but I dont think anyone really knows how much has been recorded.  I am an alt-country snob and am coming off of my own 1600 or so CD collection and another 500 albums and there is not much I cannot find in that library.  So… that is pretty awesome for a music head.  You want to listen to a little… I dont know...lets be pathetic… The Eagles...you search, they pop up along with their top 5 songs.  You can press shuffle and it starts with that and then goes through the others...as long as you want.  You can also scroll down and it comes up with the first few albums followed by an option to see all the artists albums. It is awesome.

Play that funky music white boy
Play that funky music right
Play that funky music white boy
Lay down the boogie and play that funky music till you die
Till you die, ya
Till you die
-Wild Cherry

They also have a plethora of curated playlists and you can axcess other users playlists and that can be overwhlming.  The best part is the magic algorithm  Pandora used it to populate your station but this sends you playlists that match up with your listening interests and… it is really good.  The BEST part is new or newsish and that is their “Realease Radar” which curates a new 20 song playlist every friday of recent releases.  After an album appears on your Release Radar you willget songs off that album if the algorithm and the lisyening public think that they are good and, it has got me listening to new music again on a consistent basis.  

For me it allows to listen to new music the algorithm finds for me and then move it to a playlist of my own for later accessing. I dump everything I like into a 2016 playlist and then slowly move the best stuff to a Best of 2016 and… it is pretty fine for my tastes and once again, it is new stuff.  It might be John Prine or Bob Weirs new stuff but it is still new and often it is bands I have never heard of.  It is all good.

Switching it over to AM
Searching for a truer sound
Can't recall the call letters
Steel guitar and settle down

The bad part… well there is no bad part other than you cannot get certain artists like Taylor Swift or Neil Young…  The new services like Amazon and Tidal are trying to be more attractive through artists and exlusives that you can only find on their services.  It makes me yawn.  It willall be everywhere sooner or later and with all the worlds music at my fingertips… do I need Taylor Swift and her Dr. Luke and Max Martin “collaberated” gems or would I prefer listening to Bonnie Raitt Billie Holiday?  I can wait for her greatness.  

An example of what you cant get:

http://time.com/4274430/spotify-albums/

Anyway, SPotify is winning.  There is likely to be two other survivors and they are likely going to be Amazon and iTunes because they have massive capital behind them and a huge base of users who will want one provider for everything.  I like Amazon for Books and historically Apple for technology (though they appear to be “waining”) and Spotify… The St. Louis Diner Review recoemnds Spotify for music.  For 120 bucks a year, if you are a junky it feels like it is free.

Decluttering Diary Volume I: Beginning To Sell My Children

Soooo…. I am old.  Recently my wife and I have come to the conclusion that we have too much stuff.  Looking around our home and in our basement it is hard to deny.  As discussed over the last several years I like music.  I listen to a lot of music.  I like to go to shows and historically I have liked to “buy” and “own” music.  I have come to realization that this is dark ages stuff.  Streaming has won and my 1500 (or so) CD’s will one day be of all the value of 1500 8-Tracks and it is going to happen sooner rather than later.  My albums… they are different at least for now. They have art and liner notes my 53 year old eyes can read.  But CD’s?  They never had any magic.  They were beautiful and functional but… they seemed like a logical place for me to start the decluttering process.

I have over the years ripped many of these onto various computer hard drives and subsequently lost some of the libraries when i got new computers.  iTunes solved that storage dilemma but only up to 25,000 songs so there was a picking and choosing process while also adding new audio files and downloads instead of actually buying new CD’s.  When I decided that this would be first test of my resolve I asked my son for my birthday to put together ripping machine and hard drive to rip all CD’s to hard drive and up into the cloud.  He built me a pretty little two disk drive Hacintosh and wrote out detailed instructions for how to rip and I have now started the process in earnest.

I type this after ripping (with Jon giving me a head start of doing 50 or so about 100 CD’s.  It is interesting and it is painful.  Interesting to see how many jewel boxes had concert tickets stuffed into them, a quaint habit I picked up somewhere along the line.  Interesting because he also hooked me up with something called “Delicious Library” which allows me to scan the barcodes of the ripped CD’s and it creates visual library of art together with information on the Cd as well as current value of CD on Amazon.  This “value” proposition remains to be tested.  But it was interesting too to see how the market has “valued” my collection (more on that later).  Painful is just because I love the music and I am a hoarder.  Seeing that I have 11 Yo La Tengo CDs is a thing of awe and beauty to me and the fact that 80% of you reading this have no idea who Yo La Tengo is magnifies my sense of the “importance” of my “collection”.

So I sit in front of my machine I load, I open as audio file in something called XLD, I get the track names downloaded and then I rip something called a FLAC file which my son tells me can then convert into an MP3 file.Each one takes about 10 minutes and I can do 2 at a time. I tried to find a high school kid to do this but couldn't and now realize that it would take all the profit out of it.  I have opened up an EBay account and I think I need to open Amazon account as well to sell.  

I took 96 CD’s to Euclid records and they were very professional with me.  I advised that I was coming in to sell my children.  The young lady did not seem sympathetic or interested but she was polite.  I left them my name and number and about ½ hour later she told me they wanted 26 of them and would pay me 72 dollars.  I had priced them Amazon as being worth about 300 total.but was looking at this first batch as an experiment.  She explained  that the ones I saw as “valuable were worth 5 bucks to them, the rest were either two dollars or one dollar,  That just happened.  I feel somewhat violated but I think when you sell your children you feel that way.  There is a site called Decluttr which will pay me .40 each for them and handle shipping but I think I try my hand at Amazon and/or Ebay and maybe make a trip to Vintage Vinyl.  I will report.  The process should take me well into the Spring and as of this point for CD’s that probably cost me 1000 bucks I am 72 dollars to the good but I still have 70 of them to get rid of. I have opened a special account for the liquidation of my “treasures” starting with the CD’s, followed by the books I am embarrassed of (Dick Francis, John Grisham and what not) and then...the comic books...scrap metal...who knows.  This might be an interesting obsession…. maybe a sad little book…”The Baby Boomers Guide To Selling Your Children, (Decluttering)”.  What could go wrong?