Tonight I briefly tuned in to Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN and quickly changed it away — the Iowa caucus was the story of the day, and I started hating on the candidates onscreen within seconds. Like Mary J. Blige, I too do not need no hateration, so off to hockey I went. I’ve also pre-emptively decided to avoid as much political TV as possible this year, possibly even the debates, in favor of reading about everything via digital media. Political TV, even mostly impartial news, just infuriates me in a way the Internet doesn’t. Why?
I’ve pinned it down to the fact that TV takes away the emphasis on idea exchange by adding in the visual element. If I’m making judgments about some proposed initiative that matters to me, I don’t want any of a number of talking heads all up on my screen trying to force me into thinking one way or another. Let me read what I want and process it rather than adding in the specific face I’ll end up wanting to punch — that just clouds my judgment. This argument isn’t to pretend that the Internet isn’t full of blathering, shouting morons, because any comments section is almost instantly infected by their vitriol and mistyped ooze. But when the most in-your-face communication these screamers can use is to type in all caps, it really doesn’t take much to brush past the bullshit online.
I’ll make the counterintuitive case that the Internet actually makes us more rational towards the issues than we were in the TV era — sure, it’s easy to fall into an echo chamber almost anywhere online, but how many people now are at least using some semblance of “facts” instead of who has better hair? Keep your face out of my face, and we all benefit.
When I was 18 and went off to Northwestern, I thought the newfound ability to centrally store, play and enlarge my music library through compressed MP3 files was the coolest thing ever. (Then-beloved Winamp also had those great skins: The purple theme and NU logo from Daniel’s Winamp Skins (still online since 1998!) went so well with Busch Light and DJ Kool’s “Let Me Clear My Throat” in a Bobb dorm room.)
When I was 23 and got around to an iTunes account and MP3 player, I thought being able to legally buy music for cheap and run the whole library on a handheld device was the coolest thing ever. (You gotta outgrow the college piracy at some point.)
Yet eventually my fascination with those two digital-music mediums wore out, and the poor interface and DRM annoyances, respectively, sank me into sonic complacence. But based on my experience, the newest (at least to the U.S.) digital-music wunderkind has the promise to stick around for a lifetime of ear-splitting goodness: Spotify.
I’ve had a Spotify paid account for almost two months now, and this fits into my “the bomb” pantheon of software. For $10 a month, I get access to unlimited plays of more than 15 million instantly retrieved songs, whenever and wherever I want. The Spotify Android app duplicates all of this functionality on my phone, including being able to play tracks without the Internet connection if I’ve created and synced the tunes to a playlist. Normally I’m a cheap bastard online, but hell yeah I’ll pay $10 for that type of music-fan elation and convenience.
Spotify has been an iTunes killer for me because its catalog has just one DRM gate. I have no idea how $10 per month makes enough money for Spotify to get access to the Universal, Warner, EMI, Sony and Merlin catalogs (UPDATE 10/11 – Seems they aren’t making enough money to do that) — according to The Guardian, it’s because the creative talent is getting screwed on their share (shocking) — but for us end users, the goal has always been to get in the door and gorge on as many songs as we want. Spotify chief Daniel Ek is completely correct in this article when he says that any music service needs to be more convenient than piracy to be successful, and Spotify miraculously does that with the companies’ cooperation.
Providing this single, convenient gate is where the main competitors fall short. iTunes’ single-track DRM means it would theoretically cost me $14 million to fully access the catalog, which is quite a bit more than the $12,000 I’d pay to access Spotify for 100 years. Spotify may tie me to its application for playing any Spotify-accessed music, and I have to add tracks to a playlist to take them with me offline, but so many iTunes downloads restrict playability to iTunes and Apple systems that this is basically a wash between the two. (I’ve lost several purchased albums by switching out of iTunes, the most anger-inducing being Meantime by Helmet, which was a great “time to kick ass at weights or PowerPoint” album.) On the unlimited-play side, Grooveshark ostensibly does a lot of the same stuff as Spotify for free, but it’s got huge shortcomings: Grooveshark’s catalog depends on user uploads, playing local files is a convoluted pain in the ass, the mobile app requires a paid subscription, and I have to be connected to the Internet to play anything.
The importance of playlists in Spotify means I’ve made some themed gems, including “Destroy All Workouts”, “Your Basic NYC Meat-Market Bar Circa 2004″, “Yes, I Sometimes Listen to Hipster/Indie Shit” and “Music For Baby Boomers in Powerboats at the Three Rivers Regatta”. I also use the Starred playlist to rotate songs in and out of music-binge mode, so that’s a pretty eclectic grouping that currently features Lil’ Wayne, The National, Megadeth, Nicki Minaj, Nirvana, The Kills and The Archies. (“Sugar Sugar” is still the shit after 40 years.) The best part? You too can subscribe to “Music For Baby Boomers in Powerboats at the Three Rivers Regatta”, because Spotify did a great job with playlist sharing across Facebook friends using the service.
To close, the executive summary of this post: Spotify is great.
Like most Americans, I can instantly recall what I was doing, thinking and feeling on September 11, 2001. Within a year I was working for the national news media in a New York City still processing the attack, and the ongoing military response to that day has been at the center of my brother’s, brother-in-law’s and friends’ time in the service. It’s been a divisive decade for the United States, and we’re entering the 2010s arguing about how to reverse the demoralizing political and economic damage — much of it self-inflicted — that we still face today.
That ongoing trauma sparks two emotional reactions in our culture: reactive anger at all that’s happened and all the negativity we’ve had to endure, and grief for the trauma itself. Even at the early stages of the anniversary, these two emotions are guiding how we look back. Full-throated political commentary is plentiful about the events subsequent to Sept. 11th (Politico, Hitchens in Slate), but remembrances of the day itself are muted and emotional in a way that’s probably the only possible theme (NBC New York, the upcoming TIME special). It’s a delicate balancing act when approaching something visceral for all of us, and it’s what will guide this week online.
I was 21 on Sept. 11th, and my own past decade featured the myriad ups and downs that that time in life represents. As much negative emotion as Sept. 11th and the American experience since then has brought, and even with some of the tougher things that occurred in my own life in that time, there have been so many positive things that coincided. Humans can never eliminate the sadness that’s part of life and existence, and this commemoration is a powerful reminder of that. But I’m also quietly thankful that those positive things have still occurred despite the wider circumstances, and that keeps me going.
Martin Sheen’s bio page on Wikipedia says his mom’s name was Mary Ann Phelan, and that she came from a small village in County Tipperary. Not coincidentally per this post, my own grandma’s name was Phelan and she also came from a small village in Tipperary, albeit slightly farther south than Martin’s mom’s village.
While I feel bad for Charlie these days, I’ll claim them as distant celebrity family. This is particularly useful after the longstanding notion that Buffalo Bill Cody was a relative was sadly debunked last year. Still bitter about that one.
In my new self-appointed function as official DJ of patrickstack.com, we’re going with the infamous proto-punk outfit for this inaugural feature. Rock out:
