where does your music come from?

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I want to support the artists who make the music I love, but I don’t have a lot of money and I don’t like to support any of the labels under the RIAA. I also hate DRM.

Amie Street is my favorite way to get music. They have lots of fantastic music (Cat Power, Interpol, The New Pornographers) and its easy to find new music you might like. The prices are amazing, ranging from free to 98 cents a song. Price is based on how many people have purchased the song – the more people buy it, the higher the price. If you recommend a song and it gets more popular, you get money to buy more songs. Plus, there’s no DRM and artists get most of the profits:

Artists collect 70% of the money from each song after it has made $5. The first $5 of each song covers our storage, bandwidth, and transaction costs for that song. This one-time only charge is deducted from your first royalty check so there is no risk: you only have the $5 deducted after you make it.

My second favorite way to get music is on lala. This service makes trading CDs easy. You make a “have list” and a “want list” and lala sends you shipping materials. You get an email when someone adds a CD from your “have list” to their “want list.” Then you mail a CD. There’s a points system, so you receive about as many CDs as you send. Every trade costs $1.75. I’ve shipped 44 and received 47 CDs since December 2006. One of the things I like best about lala is that you never know what CD you’ll get next! I really love surprises.

My last resort for buying music is to get it used off of Amazon. I do this only if I can’t get it through lala or amie street and/or can’t wait for it to ship on lala.

if i had a million dollars…

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If I had more time and money, I would

  • take ballroom dance
  • keep studying Chinese
  • learn French
  • do yoga
  • grow bonsai
  • travel more
  • read more
  • bake more
  • go hiking on weekends
  • send my sister lots of silly packages
  • visit my brother and all of the other people I miss

Since my situation is unlikely to change for quite a long time, I have resolved to do as many of these things as I can, regardless of the constraints of time and money. Time is harder to get around than money. Hopefully, someone is working on a time machine as we speak. I would be very excited if it actually looked like this:

time machine

If you use a feed reader…

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Go to my site today! I’ve changed the layout again.

If you see big blank white areas in the sidebars, it’s probably because you have adblock (of course you have adblock – how do people survive the internet without it?). If you’d rather see ads than white space, go to tools -> adsense -> whitelist this page.

am i a hippy now?

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When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are.

An excerpt from Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses in Sisters of the Earth.