Random Start: Dare You To Move by Switchfoot

Even though I've grown tired of Switchfoot to some degree this is one of their best songs - so good they used it on 2 records!  And it's been covered by Taylor Swift, which pleases my daughter.  Great song.

Random Start: I Always Do by Mark Heard

I couldn't find a version of Mark Heard performing this (since A. he's pretty obscure and B. he passed away in 1992).  This is one of the world's best guitarists covering it in a tribute.  Mark Heard was a great songwriter and some of the songs resonate with me even though the overall style isn't my cup of tea.  Now about Phil Keaggy - early on in my time in Nashville, when I was going to Belmont he would frequently play shows at a coffeehouse in Franklin called Cafe Milano.  His skills are pretty mesmerizing and this makes me wonder if he's still doing shows.  Super nice guy too.

Random Start: The Casket of Roderic Usher by Finch

I used to like this band a lot more than I do now.  They're one of the bands I found in my file-sharing days.  This is a pretty hectic song, but their other stuff is a mix of heaviness with melody, which appeals to me.  I don't really care if I never hear this song again.

Random Start: You've Been Flirting Again by Bjork

I was hoping for a more rousing start, but got this instead.  zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Random Start: Yellow Submarine by Ringo Starr

Yup, it's Random.  I don't even know how this got into my collection as I certainly didn't search it out.

Random Start: Break It Up by We Are Scientists

This is a great fan made video by some people in Russia - seems they were pretty excited for We Are Scientists to come through on their tour.  They are one of the better bands to come out of the garage rock scene.  They've got some pretty serious hooks in a few of their songs, including this one.

Random Start: Backdrifts. (Honeymoon is Over) by Radiohead

This is from Radiohead's "Hail To The Thief" record - I don't know if it's a jab at former Pres. Bush or not but I'm guessing so.  It seems like Radiohead is coming out of the "weird" era they got into with Kid A, Amnesiac and this record.  King of Limbs had some more accessible sounding songs and they just released some new singles that REALLY sound like something that would have been on OK Computer or The Bends - music to MY ears.

Random Start: Go Home by Bad Veins

This band toured with Thrice about a year and a half ago and I downloaded their record to "study" it in case I got out to see the tour.  It didn't come to Nashville and I didn't make it to any of the shows on that tour.  I've put 3 songs from this record onto my phone, so it's decent, but not something in heavy rotation.  

Random Start: Just As I Am by Andrew Peterson

I don't know much about Andrew Peterson other than that he's pals with some of my old music friends from Belmont and they do these "Behold the Lamb" Christmas tours together.  That's the reason I downloaded the record, and because from what could tell he writes authentic worship type music.  Some nice songs on this one.

Random Start: The Sound (John M. Perkins' Blues) by Switchfoot

This is one of the more successful crossovers from the Christian music marketplace into the general market.  I'm very happy for these guys - they've been working hard at it for years and have always written great songs.  To be frank I've listened to a LOT of Switchfoot in the last few years and have burned out a bit on the sound.  I'll give it a break for awhile and come back to it later I'm sure.

Random Start: Let There Be Light by Justice

When Justice first came on the scene a few years ago I was still into electronic music and they were the next hot thing.  They were in regular rotation for a LONG time and I still like these tracks.

Random Start: Stir It Up by Bob Marley

I have to admit that I didn't get my first Bob Marley song until after watching the movie "I Am Legend."  Will Smith plays the role of a man who thinks he may be the only person left in the world not infected with a disease and Bob Marley's music is part of what keeps him going.  I've heard the hits that everyone knows...and frankly, that's what I've downloaded.  Reggae's not my thing, but having some of it here does make for a well rounded music collection.

Random Start: St. James Infirmary Blues by The White Stripes

The White Stripes are one of the most overrated things ever.  There, I said it.

Random Start: Shrinky Dinks by Ghoti Hook

Ghoti Hook is one of the bands I booked back in the Davdon days.  This was a fun band and they were road warriors - did TONS of shows. I think that's probably a lot of what did them in - too much time on the road.  Their first 2 records were fun and goofy and with the last few they started taking themselves more seriously.  This is from the first record.

Football Is Over!! Now What?

I've seen lots of internet traffic from people lamenting the end of football season, wishing for August/September to come quickly so they can get their fix.  I used to be that guy...used to follow football season all during the off-season when nothing is happening.  The Offseason is one of the 4 seasons, right?  There's Pre-Season, Regular Season, Post-Season and Off-Season.


The usual options are there.  The NBA season is happening (blah).  Baseball starts in April (better, but still some blah).  March Madness is fun, but it's only a few weeks.  Hockey is in full swing and its season will wind down in May and have playoffs in the Summer.  


Why not consider soccer?  This is a great time to check things out.  Any sports fan has some form of ESPN, and every Saturday morning (and many Sundays) they'll show an English Premier League game in High Def.  If you're a bigger sports fan you have a more advanced TV package and may have the Fox Soccer Channel.  On Comcast in Nashville it's channel 707.  They show games ALL THE TIME - just ask my wife;).  While it's not in HD (BOO COMCAST) they show lots of games from the EPL and Serie A, the top league in Italy.


So why is now a good time to check soccer out?


1. The Premier League season is just past its halfway point and the race at the top is tight.  There are no playoffs in the league, so the winner is the team with the most points at the end.  The rest of the teams are fighting to make sure they're in the top 4 spots so they qualify for next year's Champion's League tournament.  At the bottom of the table (standings) the bottom 3 teams will be relegated, so you'll see them fighting for their league lives to avoid being pushed to the next league down, and losing TONS of revenue.


2.  Several tournaments are happening during the league season and they're getting to the end stages.  The FA Cup pits all levels of professional clubs in England against each other.  Many EPL giants still remain, but so do many smaller clubs - and right now those smaller clubs have the chance to be giant killers since there are 8 teams left and we're in knockout rounds.  The other BIG tournament happening is Champions League, which includes the top 4 teams from each top league in Europe.  We're getting down to the end of CL and this is when you truly see some of the best teams and players in the world testing each other.  


3.  It's a free flowing game in a more compact package.  While you're used to watching a football game that generally lasts 3 hours and has frequent breaks in play, commercials and timeouts a soccer game lasts a tidy 2 hours and the only break in play is halftime.  Get your snacks and beer at the start because if you leave you might miss something.  


The common complaint about soccer is that it's boring.  I'd really urge you to give it a shot - and watching EPL is a perfect place to start as the pace is generally very fast.  Currently several Americans are having success in England.  Tim Howard is a fixture in goal for Everton.  Clint Dempsey has become America's best soccer player and is one of the league's top scorers at Fulham.  Landon Donovan is on another short term loan at Everton, but he's making a difference and they're winning more games with him in the midfield.  Bolton is a struggling club that is waiting for Stu Holden to heal from injury, and also just signed American defender Tim Ream.  My Spurs signed the aging but still top flight Brad Friedel at keeper and he's having a stellar season.  


Those of us in Nashville have a VERY cool opportunity coming up in March with Olympic qualifiers.  We'll have the U.S. team here along with 3 other countries and will have three days of doubleheaders.  The games are at LP field and all seating is in the lower bowl with tickets starting at $20.  My family went to the U.S. Mens Team friendly against Paraguay recently and it was an awesome experience.  These games will count toward something so expect goals and for the teams to be "going for it".  

Random Start: Speckled Bird by The Choir

I have personally underrated this band - not given them enough credit for being as good as they are.  They write great songs with colorful lyrics and this song is from one of their best records.

The Future of Music Consumption

I've been thinking a lot of about music consumption over the last few years and have come to a conclusion about what I think will happen.  If you look around now people are primarily accessing music digitally - either through a mobile media player or online.  I want to look back to see where we've come from, how we got here and where we're going with this.  This may even be helpful to some people who aren't familiar with the current ways to access music and may not be doing what's best for them.  


I was going to start with a history of recorded music and how things progressed through different types of formats and onto what we use today...but I'm not a historian and am not qualified to get into those details without doing a lot of research on it.  We all know that the media used to carry music have evolved over the years...no news there.  


Many people may not know the business model that's existed in the music business for years.  The changes we're experiencing now are having major effects on this business model so it's worth a few sentences.  To put it in a most basic model, when you buy a CD the money from that purchase is split among all the groups that made it happen.  The store gets a cut, the distributor does, the record company gets a BIG cut, and then the songwriters get about 9 cents per song.


In the 1990s the advent of Napster and other file sharing services created easy ways for people to access music without paying for it.  This pretty much destroyed the business model for everyone listed above.  This is stealing, no two ways about it.  I admit that I used Kazaa while it was available and found a LOT of music that I never would have found outside of being able to "demo" pretty much anything in the world.  If we're being honest with ourselves we know that a lot of bands were discovered by fans through file sharing and while they weren't compensated for their works, their fan bases grew very quickly, so it wasn't ALL bad.


I think it's a fair analogy to say file sharing was a bit like Noah's flood.  The music business was pretty broken anyway, and some parts of the team were grossly overcompensated while others were barely paid for their work.  Breaking the music business allowed it to start over again, and led the creators to take charge of their product again, determining for themselves how it would be made, distributed and sold.


Radiohead made major waves a few years ago with their record In Rainbows that they recorded themselves (with their own money), and released digitally and allowed buyers to name their own price.  I paid about $5 for it.  Radiohead had been getting weird and I didn't want to shell out a lot for something that I may not like.  Many artists are now taking Radiohead's idea and doing EVERYTHING themselves.  They aren't allowing buyers to pay whatever they want, but they're in control again.  Radiohead have admitted they are selling FAR LESS records than they were with major label support, but also that they're making FAR MORE money per record sold than before.  It's a win/win for them because they're abandoning a system that benefitted the system more than themselves and now they're in control and can operate how they want to.  


Many bands I listen to now aren't signed with major labels, or even with labels at all.  They're getting loans or using their own money to record and distributing their music digitally.  They're having to ask the question: How do we want to get our product to the public, and what do we expect in return?  This article has comments from Trent Reznor regarding his feelings about creating, the value of his creations and being compensated for them.  Artists ARE having to tour to survive since the revenue stream from record sales has shrunk.  To increase their profits on the road many of them have taken to creating their own merchandise too - DIY is back en force once again.  


As consumers we're asking ourselves a question too: How do I want to access music and what do I expect to pay for it?  I asked some friends how they get music and the overwhelming answer was iTunes.  With this service you're paying around $1 per song and can transfer it to your iPod/iPhone and a limited number of computers.  And with iTunes you download songs from the iTunes music store onto your computer's hard drive or your media player.


It goes without saying that CDs are still sold in stores.  While your actual "rights" with a CD are supposed to be limited to personal use this is the format that allows the most freedom.  You can rip it onto your computer, and unlimited other computers, upload files to sharing sites, email the files, burn onto CDs, and load them onto media players.  Some of these things aren't technically within a user's "rights", but most people don't know that and don't care.  


Subscription services allow a user to pay a fee and allow certain uses of its media.  With Zune I pay $16 per month and download files from Zune Marketplace to my computer's hard drive, and can load the media files on up to three Zune or Windows Phone devices.  This is the perfect solution for me as a hardcore audiophile.  I'm able to pay what is a VERY reasonable monthly fee and get all the music I want.  Frankly, if I had to pay iTunes rates I would have to either curb my appetite or end up spending far too much of my income on music.  And don't tell the people at Microsoft, but I'd be willing to pay double per month for my current subscription since I'm getting THAT much value out of it...SSSHHH!


Lastly, you can still steal your music through the few file sharing sites that remain due to loopholes in the legal system that allow their existence.  Again, I admit that I did use Kazaa for awhile, but after working in the music industry and seeing how stealing music affects people who create for a living I can't call it anything but theft and piracy.  The ONLY time I'll consider searching for a free download is when something is out of print and simply can't be bought anymore.  If there's no one to be compensated from a purchase, then no harm no foul, right?...right?  Maybe, maybe not.  Take a look at this chart to see how creators are compensated when their works are accessed through some of the services we use today.


I think if we look at what's happening digitally we'll see the future of music consumption.  Our computers' hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper.  I'm noticing that storage capacities on our media players have NOT been increasing to match our computers...and they really can't be expected to.  Early generations of Zunes, iPods and other media players used spinning drives, and their capacities did eventually get to be over 200GB, which is a TON of music.  If you know anything about hard drives you know that a full hard drive is a slow hard drive...and also that they're fragile.  Media players now are using flash storage.  It's very durable, accessed faster and has no moving parts, but capacities aren't as big and larger capacities are MUCH more expensive.  


So, media player capacities aren't really growing anymore, but our network speeds and bandwidths ARE.  I believe we're marching down a road that will lead us to the CLOUD being the norm when it comes to music.  Why do we need to store all of these files and take up all this space on our computers, phones and media players when we can access them in the cloud instantly and play them back flawlessly?  Well, right now we can't.  We're not there yet but we're going there.  The future of music consumption will be with various cloud providers actually housing the music files and charging us a fee to access them.  Some of these services today are Spotify, Zune Marketplace, iTunes and Google music.  They're not perfect yet but we're on our way, and I'm looking forward to it.  

 I love what Spotify has done by allowing users to take their music experience to the cloud and access their "personal" experience anywhere they can get a connection.  However, the mobile experience isn't yet to the point where I'm willing to abandon my Zune Marketplace and loading songs via subscription to my phone.  Network speeds and bandwidth still need to grow more, but the future of music consumption and accessibility looks clearly linked to cloud services accesses through extremely fast networks.  I'm just hopeful the costs for users will continue to remain reasonable AND that creators can be paid fairly.  

Random Start: Train by Michael Knott

This has is my favorite Michael Knott record - an album of stories of the people who lived in his apartment building in Hollywood in the 80's.  Over the years I think I've amassed his entire catalog of solo records along with his records with LSU/LifeSavers/Lifesavers Underground and Aunt Bettys.  I've lost a few of my old CDs and can't find them for download now..will have to keep hunting.

Random Start: American Slang by The Gaslight Anthem

The Gaslight Anthem were just featured a few weeks ago in Random Start and I mentioned how much better their second record is than the debut.  Very cool now that the title track of that 2nd album pops up now.  This is the song that got me hooked on them.  I've seen recent tweets from the band that they're recording in Nashville right now.  It's great our town is becoming a haven for quality rock bands right now.

Random Start: Words In The Water (Polaris at Noon Remix) by Thrice

I've been sick for a few days and haven't posted anything, so it's very cool to have this song come up in my Random Start today.  This is a remix of one of my favorite songs off Thrice's newest record, Major/Minor.  After a tour this Spring Thrice will no longer be a full time band, so I'm eagerly awaiting the routing and dates so I can make plans to see them in this "final" run.  Awesome lyrics in this song: 


And when I lost all hope to look 
Someone took that heavy book from my hands 
All it's weight they set aside 
After they had satisfied it's demands
I felt white and black reverse 
And the lifting of a curse from my heart
Then like one receiving sight 
I beheld a brilliant light in the dark