Progressive Wednesday

Yes to Music, No to Muzak: Buy

Buy:

One of the best ways to support music is to (drumroll please…) pay for it. So, we urge you to lay down a little dinero in the name of the artists you love. Here’s how…

• Tickets:

Okay, take a break from the Internet: stop looking at this computer screen and go see a rock, jazz, punk, country, or folk show at a bar or pub or coffee shop. Or go listen to your nearest city’s philharmonic orchestra. Or go witness the beauty of children or teens learning to make music at a school performance (just check the weekend section of your local paper or call up the schools). If you do one of these things before the next Wednesday, we’re convinced you’ll get hooked. We’d dig hearing brief reviews of what you saw. We’ll publish some with your permission.

If you buy tickets for a rock show at a larger venue, see if the band or artist sells tickets through a different agency than the all-but-monopoly that is Ticket Master, such as Music Today or Front Gate Tickets or right from the venue, which likely will save you some of the service fees.

• Albums:

We recommend taking advantage of CDBaby.com or CDUniverse.com. In a nutshell (we like pistachios), CD Baby is an independent company selling independent music, and CD Universe is an independent company selling more mainstream music. Might we suggest, Loose Fur’s Born Again in the USA, Ani DiFranco’s Living in Clip, or our very own Alyson Greenfield’s Six Songs. Buying albums helps support the work of musicians, whose creativity should be rewarded. We think that the folks, the ones who make your daily commutes tolerable or your sex mix-tapes sexy, deserve some cash-money.

Better yet, find a small music store near you. That extra buck or two you pay helps someone keep a roof over their head.

• Songs:

As in, don’t just buy single songs off iTunes. iTunes might be good for independent musicians, but the quality of the sound files, to put it politely as we can, sucks. To quote an excellent piece by Thom Hogan:

iTunes AAC files don’t sound as good as CDs. AAC is a “lossy” compression format: it shrinks the sound file by throwing away subtle nuance and texture that a computer program thinks you won’t be able to hear. The thing is, you can hear it. You might not notice listening to your iPod…but if you … listen to your new iTunes album on a real stereo, it won’t have the same nuance, punch, and presence that a CD has.

• Cut Loose:

Okay, this one’s gonna be tough, but this is a biggie: lose the peer-to-peer file-sharing of MP3s. Here’s what we’re asking: delete the software that you use. If you don’t, it’ll be like keeping a carton of Marlboros in your closet while you’re trying to kick the habit. File-sharing might actually help independent artists gain notoriety and increase attendance at shows, but it doesn’t seem fair to us to rampantly transmit music that the band doesn’t want transmitted for free. And file-sharing can hurt small businesses.

Many bands seem to offer free MP3s or video from their pages. Maybe try those. Or check out 3hive, a great resource for free MP3 from indie bands. If nothing else, maybe cut back to one pack a day.

(Note: we’re not suggesting an end to making CDs to give to your friends. When our pals give us CDs, we’ve noticed that we either don’t listen to the songs we don’t dig, or we buy albums by the artists we do. Odds are you do the same.)

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