Soapy 'burbs, the iTunes Cartel, and God Bless Instant Gratification
I originally heard of this band, Cities of Foam, two years ago, durring pepsi's first "buy our soda and get free itunes downloads" promotion. Being a pepsi swilling cheapskate, I was all over this promotion. I installed iTunes @ work and began downloading free music like a crack addict who was given the keys to the lab. Another of the tricksey and devious schemes iTunes implemented was a 'music spotlight' where they would have 2 or 3 songs from random artists available for free download for a week, in hopes of you purchasing more music by the same artist. Remember kids, the first one's free.
So there it was, Out of Reach by Cities of Foam, smiling benignly at me from the corner of my iTunes window.
what the hell I thought, it's free after all
I listened to the 30 second teaser they had, hard to get a handle on the song from just that. So I downloaded it. OMG, fucking awesome.
Haunting vocals by london jazz singer Nia Lynn overtop what sounds uncannily like trip-hop. Only it's trip-hop stripped bare of it's electronic regalia and reduced to a subdued bass line and acoustic guitar.
this is going somewhere, I promise...
loved the song, but too cheap to buy the rest of the album. I made a vain search on limewire for the rest of it. Wouldn't you know, my music is too esoteric for that bunch of file-swapping louts. Not a single return.
Two years pass, the song remains in several playlists and surfaces into regular rotation every once in a while.
December 2005 rolls around and I purchase a secksey new computer. Now comes the tedious process of moving all the non-work related files from my work PC to my home PC, including 7gb of music and about 1gb of pictures and miscellaneous files. The files have been long since moved over via a 1gb jump drive, but I have been putting off the arduous task of copying all my music files to my home PC. I can burn them all to disk and keep the number down to 8 disks of music provided I don't convert to CDFS during the burn process. That's still a lot of time wasted at work, and when 5pm rolls around, the last thing I want to do is hang around burning CD's. So it hadn't been done yet.
This weekend, before leaving work, I set up a gotomypc session on my PC. Gotomypc, for those that don't know, is a service that enables you to access a computer remotely from any computer connected to the internet (for a small fee of course). My company uses it extensively when supporting franchise owners who have PC trouble. I am the keeper of the gotomypc account. It's good to be the king >:]
So, gotomypc session enabled I come home and begin copying my entire music folder to my personal PC. I set the session timeout at 30 hours and go about my business. Saturday at 5pm the transfer finally completes. I have all my music! Yay! I start going through the lists of artists, albums, and songs now populating my media player, listening to gems that I hadn't listened to in ages.
(we're getting back on track now, I promise)
nestled in my songlist is Out of Reach by Cities of Foam. So I listen to it, still fucking good. I decide to google the band to see if there's any news (or perhaps another free download) of them. I find their website (linked above). They have 30 second blurbs of all the songs on their album. All fucking great. So in a whim of self gratification (not that kind children, get your minds out of the gutter), I decide that if they have a way to purchase and download the songs, I will.
No Luck, but they have a link to Amazon. mayhap I can download the songs there...no love. To make things worse, they want $18.00 plus shipping to get me the CD, and it takes 5 days before the blasted thing is even shipped! Way too long for me.
Then Cali, whom I happen to be chatting with, has a wonderful idea. Why not buy the album from iTunes? So back to the crack shack I go. Download iTunes, install, wonder of wonders I remember my account password. There it is, the whole fucking album for a whopping $10.00! Needless to say within 5 minutes time I had dropped the electronic 10-spot and downloaded 14 fantastic songs, which I am currently listening to.
Of course there is the minor problem that I use Windows Media Player, not iTunes, but that is easilly fixed. mp3 conversion ftw!
back to the point....does anyone remember where I was going with this?
Ah well, this is why I'm not a good story teller. I try to provide backstory, so that no nuance is lost in the actual story, and invariably the whole thing gets muddled.
The point..the point...Oh yes. Go get the Cities of Foam album A Great Day for the Race. Download from iTunes for instant enjoyment, or be a wuss and order it from Amazon.
Contentless: check
Rambling: check
Grammatical/Spelling errors: legion
Mediocrity achieved! Watch the fingers, they may blister.
p.s. logo still pooched, sigh
EDIT: new logo up, needs some tweakin though
So there it was, Out of Reach by Cities of Foam, smiling benignly at me from the corner of my iTunes window.
what the hell I thought, it's free after all
I listened to the 30 second teaser they had, hard to get a handle on the song from just that. So I downloaded it. OMG, fucking awesome.
Haunting vocals by london jazz singer Nia Lynn overtop what sounds uncannily like trip-hop. Only it's trip-hop stripped bare of it's electronic regalia and reduced to a subdued bass line and acoustic guitar.
this is going somewhere, I promise...
loved the song, but too cheap to buy the rest of the album. I made a vain search on limewire for the rest of it. Wouldn't you know, my music is too esoteric for that bunch of file-swapping louts. Not a single return.
Two years pass, the song remains in several playlists and surfaces into regular rotation every once in a while.
December 2005 rolls around and I purchase a secksey new computer. Now comes the tedious process of moving all the non-work related files from my work PC to my home PC, including 7gb of music and about 1gb of pictures and miscellaneous files. The files have been long since moved over via a 1gb jump drive, but I have been putting off the arduous task of copying all my music files to my home PC. I can burn them all to disk and keep the number down to 8 disks of music provided I don't convert to CDFS during the burn process. That's still a lot of time wasted at work, and when 5pm rolls around, the last thing I want to do is hang around burning CD's. So it hadn't been done yet.
This weekend, before leaving work, I set up a gotomypc session on my PC. Gotomypc, for those that don't know, is a service that enables you to access a computer remotely from any computer connected to the internet (for a small fee of course). My company uses it extensively when supporting franchise owners who have PC trouble. I am the keeper of the gotomypc account. It's good to be the king >:]
So, gotomypc session enabled I come home and begin copying my entire music folder to my personal PC. I set the session timeout at 30 hours and go about my business. Saturday at 5pm the transfer finally completes. I have all my music! Yay! I start going through the lists of artists, albums, and songs now populating my media player, listening to gems that I hadn't listened to in ages.
(we're getting back on track now, I promise)
nestled in my songlist is Out of Reach by Cities of Foam. So I listen to it, still fucking good. I decide to google the band to see if there's any news (or perhaps another free download) of them. I find their website (linked above). They have 30 second blurbs of all the songs on their album. All fucking great. So in a whim of self gratification (not that kind children, get your minds out of the gutter), I decide that if they have a way to purchase and download the songs, I will.
No Luck, but they have a link to Amazon. mayhap I can download the songs there...no love. To make things worse, they want $18.00 plus shipping to get me the CD, and it takes 5 days before the blasted thing is even shipped! Way too long for me.
Then Cali, whom I happen to be chatting with, has a wonderful idea. Why not buy the album from iTunes? So back to the crack shack I go. Download iTunes, install, wonder of wonders I remember my account password. There it is, the whole fucking album for a whopping $10.00! Needless to say within 5 minutes time I had dropped the electronic 10-spot and downloaded 14 fantastic songs, which I am currently listening to.
Of course there is the minor problem that I use Windows Media Player, not iTunes, but that is easilly fixed. mp3 conversion ftw!
back to the point....does anyone remember where I was going with this?
Ah well, this is why I'm not a good story teller. I try to provide backstory, so that no nuance is lost in the actual story, and invariably the whole thing gets muddled.
The point..the point...Oh yes. Go get the Cities of Foam album A Great Day for the Race. Download from iTunes for instant enjoyment, or be a wuss and order it from Amazon.
Contentless: check
Rambling: check
Grammatical/Spelling errors: legion
Mediocrity achieved! Watch the fingers, they may blister.
p.s. logo still pooched, sigh
EDIT: new logo up, needs some tweakin though
posted by Bourgeois Dave at 11:32 PM
5
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