Digital Music Files Suck

Yes, I know, all you young folks swear by them, but digital music files just drive me up the wall. They suck. On the list of things that make my life miserable, digital music files, whichever format they happen to be in, are in the top ten, slowly creeping towards the number one spot.

Let’s just assume that you rip lots of CDs to your hard drive(s), either because you also want them on your PC or because you simply want to make a backup copy for safety’s sake. After all, if you were dense enough to invest 500 Bucks into a limited Mosaic box which has been out of print for ages, you also want to make sure it survives at least the next century.

Just for arguments’ sake, let’s also assume that it took a whole load of time to do all that ripping, tagging and filing away. On top of that, let’s add the assumption that you paid for and downloaded a plethora of tunes that you wanted to have without having to shell out the dough to get the full album. Finally, let’s just assume that all of the work and all of the downloads add up to about a terabyte of music, perhaps a bit more – after all, you do have about 55 to 62 meters of music, depending on how many of the clunkers you are willing to put on that list, a lot of which have ended up on your hard drives. Continue Reading →

The Demise of the Record Store

I’ve often said around these parts that collecting music also incorporates something of a haptic experience. Collectors that I know don’t only go for the music, although it is certainly the central aspect of their endeavors. Some collectors get off on special packaging and exclusive collectors boxes, others are wild about cover design, label discographies and liner notes. No matter what, there’s more to it than the music itself.

Because, in retrospect, I have really been collecting music more or less from the time I first came into contact with it, I also know that actually touching the object of desire, turning it around in your hands and analyzing its various parts used to be an important part of the purchasing process. Many of the LPs and CDs I have were also not planned purchases, but spontaneous purchase decisions that were influenced by the object itself rather than a mere description of it.

All of that has changed. Continue Reading →

Moratorium

Well, I didn’t think it was ever going to happen, but it did. I ran out of space. After reshuffling and realigning my collection over and over again, every spot is filled up. I’ve reached 45 meters plus. There are plenty of options, but at the end I decided to go for the radical one: Continue Reading →

Collecting: A Cyclical Pattern

I don’t know if I am special in this respect, but these past 10 to 20 years my collecting habits have taken on a cyclical pattern. This basically means that a specific collecting (and listening) streak reaches its saturation point and is replaced by a new one, in my case often by one that diverges sharply from the previous one. Continue Reading →

Benno and Billy dismembered

Years ago we had a runaway bestseller over here in Germany trashing “Nieten in Nadelstreifen“, which translates best as “Losers in Pinstripe Suits“. It was a real hoot and basically gave a detailed account of really bad business decisions instigated by seemingly incapable managers and outlined the full breadth of stupidity rampant in the upper echelons of German companies. Needless to say, nothing has changed since then, the German economy is down the drain, and we are chugging along as if nothing happened.

Enter IKEA, that leaping cheapo and cuddly family-oriented Swedish furniture emporium that likes to pride itself on customer relations which, if my experience is any indication, are simply non-existant. No matter, you think, after all I can get storage systems that cost less than the cardboard they are packaged in and, with a bit of experience, even the most untalented person can get them set up in no time. Who cares about (over here) their outsourced shipping and delivery which is usually so unbelievably inefficient that it hurts. You can’t take a day off? Then don’t buy from us! Who cares about the fact that quality control – at least in my eyes – has dropped significantly these past years. Just don’t think about it. If your order does arrive, and if it does actually contain what you ordered and if, last but not least, what’s inside hasn’t been shredded to bits, it was, err, cheap. We can take all the abuse, the stupid ordering system that let’s you know things are in stock when they aren’t, the friendly ladies that don’t answer the phone until you’ve heard each and every badly-recorded pop song of the last millennium (at full volume), and everything else that can cause a premature exitus. Continue Reading →

The Age of Mediocrity

I’m beginning to sound like our parents. Mine never really complained about what I was listening to, but it was often apparent that – despite being open-minded about everything I tormented their ears with – they thought I had gone off my rocker when I was blasting Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and other (to their ears) loud and obnoxious music out the speakers (at full volume, naturally).

Because of my upbringing in a family that listened to the broadest musical range possible, I was always willing to give just about everything a chance, and I’ve followed many a fad and have heard the oddest music available at any given time, but these last years, if not this last decade and longer, I noticed that I have basically gotten sick and tired of about 99% of the music being published. You just have to have a look at my collection that seems caught in a time warp, in permanent lock-down, to actually see the effect.

I can’t really pin-point the time when I basically stopped buying new music or keeping new music I had bought, or the day I basically threw my radio out the window, shut the various music video channels down permamently and stopped reading the more widely-circulated music mags, but it did happen, and it happened for a reason. Continue Reading →

Do you make backups?

If you are into collecting music as I am, there comes a time when you notice that some editions you managed to snatch up somewhere along the line have either disappeared or have reached a price that is simply unacceptable. If you regularly scout around the Internet looking for the rarer editions available in either limited form or for a limited time only, it won’t take long until you notice that the hobby you chose is probably the one to take you to your grave a lot faster than others, motor-racing not withstanding.

The two first Count Basie Roulette Live and Studio Boxes released by Mosaic Records have completely disappeared and are commanding anything from $400 to over $1000 on eBay. The wonderful seven-volume (21 CDs) reissue series “The Complete Dinah Washington on Mercury” by Verve, is fetching Amazon marketplace prices – depending on the volume you want and the country your searching in – from anywhere around $40 to $800! Some obscure single CDs might easily set you back several hundred dollars and if you try to get that elusive Blue Note original LP release, you might as well sell a kidney first.

Makes you think, doesn’t it? Continue Reading →

Where Are the Beatles?

Of course, since I wrote this post, the excellent Beatles stereo and mono masters have been released. I have added the original press release announcing those two box sets at the end of this post.

It’s become a standard method of irritating all the members on your average music forums and a way of getting April Fools’ Day in early: Mentioning, announcing or just bringing up new Beatles remasters in a subclause is guaranteed to illicit a reaction, be it mild or venomous.

The problem is simple. Aside from a compilation of #1 hits and a bunch of single remasters and the odd boxed set, the Beatles back catalog has been lying dormant far too long. What is completely missing is a concerted effort of remastering some of the best music of the 20th century (actually, any century). Continue Reading →