The great thing about music is it brings people together in so many great ways, the great thing about sharing love of similar music with my kids, is I get recommendations on some great stuff, I’m totally hooked on this Jamie Lidell track after a 3 a.m. skype session with Oli.
Then last night Kathleen organized line dancing lessons at the Broken Spoke, all I can tell you is there was a lot of trepidation in this house before Ronnie and I left. I got to learn the Texas 2-step with Leslie Tom and she was a great partner.
I just ran the stats on my little Sandisc Sansa MP3 player, I’ve had it for 3-years now, it was a great buy and yep, cheap, and no it doesn’t work with iTunes. I’ve done a few file reloads and am starting to think about music selection for the marathon I have to run at the end of the Challenge Roth ironman-distance triathlon in July. Yep, MP3 players are allowed on the run.
Overwhelmingly, the number one MP3 played on my sandisc is my Houston dance-music friend, Sven Neers’ “sven gets vocal again” mix from February 2010. It’s a perfect, uplifting, uptempo, happy/vocal house mix. It used to be available via Svens soundcloud page, at http://soundcloud.com/neer-music/sven-gets-vocal-again but it’s been taken down. There is a track listing here on his old blog and you can find it online here.
I’m so over paying fees for events, it’s such a rip-off. I just bought a ticket for my first ever visit to the One World Theatre here in Austin[the home of star’s from the 1970’s and 1980’s], I’m going to see Ramsey Lewis do Sungoddess Revisited. It was this track and the album, Sungoddess that introduced me to Earth Wind and Fire and a life long love of their music and harmonies, heck I even got the tattoo in 1976. So I wanted to get a decent seat and went for a “prime seat”, price $75. Yeah, I know.
Then came the sticker shock, for an entirely computerized print at home system, I paid an additional $14.50 in fees. One of the fees was listed as simply a transaction fee, maybe this is the fee they are paying to the credit card company so I could use my card, well I’ll get some of that back as I used a cashback card. Which still leaves an $11 fee for someone sitting down and typing the name of the event, a description, posting a picture and setting up the web page. Alright, maybe I could pay a small amount, say 20c towards the license of the software, and another $1 max. for the system time on the server, but at best thats’ $4.50. Since they actually use seatadvisor.com for bookings, the fees should be even lower.
I had thought about going their to see the Average White Band in October, but not $14.50 worth of fees. For the record, it’s not that I can’t afford it, it’s that it’s a ripoff and a barrier to entry to those who can’t. Enjoy Sungoddess…
NPR has an interesting blog entry on “What ‘Mastered For iTunes’ Really Means”. I hadn’t spotted this since I’ve been a life long Apple avoider. It’s not that I think Apple has bad products, it’s just they always, always look for a way to lock users into their systems. I’ve felt for a long time that the music industry would eventually find a way to strike back at MP3. In this case it makes perfect sense. Pay particular attenion to the last two paragraphs.
