Paying for music

When I was a little kid, back in the 1980s, my old man had a cassette copy of Fleetwood Mac's Tango in the Night that we would listen to in this rapist van he used to own. I spent a veritable shiteload of time listening to it, along with the likes of Phil Collins' No Jacket Required, Love Zone by Billy Ocean, the Whispers album with "Rock Steady," and especially Colour By Numbers by Culture Club[1].

For the past few days, I've been using a free trial version of MTV's new music service URGE to listen to those albums, along with a bunch of other shit I'd probably never end up listening to otherwise. While it's true that I could probably find a way to steal almost anything that was ever popular at one point or another, I probably never would, as evidenced by the fact that I've yet to up until this point.

Seriously, who wants to turn over 80mb, or whatever, of their hard drive to the Moody Blues' Sur La Mer, even temporarily? Creating space on my machine for every song that I might want to listen to once or twice might involve deleting some pr0n, and that's just out of the question.

The cool thing about MTV's URGE and, presumably, whatever other music stores that offer similar subscription models is that they let you stream pretty much anything you can imagine right there through the URGE console (i.e. Windows Media Player 11). If you actually own a compatible MP3 player, I suppose you could upload whatever songs you want to it.

For a while now, I've had the Apple's iTunes store on my computer. But I've yet to download anything from them because I find the idea of paying $.99 for a song, especially one that I could just as easily steal, fucking retarded. Like pretty much everything else Apple has ever produced, I wouldn't be surprised if the iTunes store ultimately ends up primarily the domain of rich homosexuals[2].

At the very least, I wouldn't be surprised if they incorporated some sort of subscription model. As much as I hate the idea of paying for music, I'm thinking about ponying up the $14, or whatever, when my trial ends just for the sheer convenience[2].

[1] My old man still spins a copy of Colour By Numbers to this day. To his credit, it really is a better album than you'd think. But nullus anyway.

[2] That said, the blogs pretty much suck. The hip-hop one hasn't been updated since May 16th. Which is amusing when you consider that the people they got running it don't even update their own blogs very often. Of course that's what's gonna happen.