trisweb.com

First, here are three albums released in the last year which have quickly (like, over the last week) become favorites.

Snow Patrol - Final Straw
The Postal Service - Give Up
Jimmy Eat World - Futures (which I have reviewed previously)

Before coming to college, I didn’t have a taste for popular music. I think that was a good thing. I got my basis in music from real music– jazz (lots of jazz) and folk and classical. Whatever my parents listened to, I listened to, and I still share some taste with them. I still listen to everything I used to. Music never leaves you; if you like something once you’ll like it for all time, and it will only continue to be more nostalgic, weighted by the memoies of the circumstances of each time you listened to it.

Only recently have I become interested in “new” music. It all started with one track I found on my roomate’s computer my freshman year: “For Me This is Heaven”, by Jimmy Eat World. I continued to branch out from there, finding myself one day with a large backlogged collection of music I should have listened to in high school. I continued collecting music I liked (yes, illegally), and today I think I’ve developed a very diverse musical taste. I think there is good music in every genre, even genres I used to think couldn’t be classified as music (ahem– Rap). There are definately genres I prefer, mainly emo and alternative rock, “folk-rock”, real folk music, bluegrass, and of course Jazz and classical.

I noticed that only in the last few months have I been really keeping up with the “new music scene,” marked by the fact that I bought “Futures” the day it was released, the first time I’ve ever done that for a CD. And despite its low-quality songs, iTunes has helped me immensly in finding new music, with its high-quality previews of almost all the music in the world, and a nice database of related songs and artists. Unfortunately for them, I go out and buy CDs instead.

One thing I do like about illegal downloads is that I can listen to an album before I decide to buy it. I have found that I generally will not buy a CD without listening to it all the way through at least once. Too many CDs these days (particularly those of popular artists) have one or two decent singles with a ton of filler, and I got hooked into that at least once, but never again. Yet another reason the industry doesn’t like file sharing. But I argue again that, at least in my case, file sharing helps them a lot. In my story above, where would I be without the means and the freedom to listen to any music in existence? Remove computers from today’s music world, and you have not only lost the entire genre of electronica, but also millions of customers who, like me, have only progressed through the immense web of music in the world through the wonderful accessibility of the internet, making lifelong customers for many bands and many genres.