Thursday, August 25, 2005

Where is the good music?

As I grow older I spend less time listening to music and then occasionally hear something that really grabs me, go out and by a CD by the artist and find I only like one or two of their other numbers. Not an experience one likes to repeat but I gather I am not alone in this.

Borders in Kingston have a system where you can hear (snatches of?) tracks on selected CDs but what I would like to do is to be able to forage across CDs and pick up only those songs which appealed to me. Would visiting Itunes or similar allow me to listen before committing? And without spending unavailable hours to do so or buying an Ipod?

Suggestions gratefully received.

2 comments:

Simon Baty said...

The whole thing about buying music from the iTunes store and the like is that you buy individual songs rather than albums. I think you can preview the songs for ten seconds or something before you buy them. Also often artists will put songs up on their websites which you can stream, so that's another good way to sample without buying. And of course there's naughty illegal downloading, which lets you sample a few songs by and artist and costs nothing! I've heard rumours you can pick up viruses that way - but of course that's not an issue if you are using a mac.

Simon Baty said...

Oh and I have a suggestion of an artist for you to try - John Butler Trio, sort of bluesy rootsy stuff, it's really good and he's Australian too.