Breaking the silence

Just long enough to talk about music.

Once upon a time, I was an avid Kazaa user. In fact, at one time Kazaa was where I derived much of my music collection. I got out of the biz as soon as the rumblings about lawsuits began, and as such free music is no longer available to me. You see, now that I know for a fact that Kazaa is being monitored, I'd be shocked if they aren't staking out other places even now.

Today, as I was driving from one place to another with my friend Burnsy, we heard a fantastic song on my current favorite radio station, 94.7 FM (link to the right). The song was "Just Like Honey" by The Jesus and Mary Chain.

I'm pretty sure I've never heard this song before. Which is funny, because at one point I had several records by said group. Once upon at time, my friend Leb decided, almost brilliantly, that CD's were a fad and that audio cassettes were the wave of the future.

I'm not kidding.

So, he sold me his entire 150 disk CD collection for about $50 (including the stackable CD racks, which were very handy) and began, in earnest, buying blank cassettes and borrowing CD's from the library to copy.

His exuberance faded soon thereafter, and it was joined by an uneasy chagrin directed at me, as I wouldn't re-sell to him.

Anyway, there was a lot of great music in that mass, but I simply never got to some of it.

So, as I was saying, I heard this song on the radio tonight, and I decided I had to have it. Immediately. Of course, that was impossible, so I had to settle for having it once I got home (provided my sieve-like memory allowed me to remember the whole notion of it).

Eventually, after collecting my uber-pregger wife from her mom's house and dropping my pal Burnsy off, we made it home and I managed to remember my aural fixation as I came down here to my computer.

First, I popped on iTunes, but then remembered I don't like buying music that way because it comes to my computer in a format that my MP3 player (Dell DJ 20) can't read, and it won't let you convert bought music. (As I'm typing this, my lovely puppy is farting up a storm...refreshing...).

Then, I tried to log into the Walmart music download area. I hate Walmart, with most of my soul, but I can't pass up an $.11/track savings.

As if to justify my hatred, Walmart's download service is down for the night.

So, then to the Musicmatch store. I finally found the track, and decided just to be safe I'd go ahead and purchase the whole Greatest Hits album for $9.99 (it's called 21 Singles, so assuming that there's some truth in advertising, I should be getting a net savings of about $10, as each track is $.99 a piece).

Why am I telling you all of this? Because there must be a better, legal music service.

Suggestions?