MIDI

For years my geek friends forced me to listen to Dream Theater. I hated it.

Yesterday they played in Tel-Aviv. The reviews are good. Oh well.

I just listened to Pull Me Under on YouTube and now i finally understood what does it sound like: like a demo song of a MIDI keyboard.

Violinist

I am living in a four-story house. In front of my window¹ there’s a fifteen-story house and it blocks the view.

It basically sucks, but a violinist lives in that house, and she² practices all day long, which is very pleasant.

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¹ I wrote “Window” first. Why would i do such a thing? :)

² Does this make me sexist?

Amazing

Kanye West wrote a book. That’s what he has to say about it:

“Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.”

I am a proud non-listener to hip-hop.

Hip-hop is not a crime. Hip-hop is not bad music. Occasionally i listen to a hip-hop song and enjoy it.

But i don’t get why some people talk about “innovative” hip-hop. Nothing changed in hip-hop in the last twenty years or so.

I heard a lot of talk about Kanye West lately. I haven’t heard any of his songs. So i tried a few on YouTube.

Fuck it. Kanye West is not innovative. M.I.A. is not innovative. Timbaland is not innovative. Eminem is not innovative. Dr. Dre is not innovative. Danger Mouse in not innovative. None of them have ever been innovative. Some of them are good artists, but none of them is innovative, never been.

And no, there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in rock music for many years now. Interpol, Elbow, Decemberists, Shins, Libertines, Arctic Monkeys – none of them are innovative. Some of them are good artists, but none of them is innovative. That’s unfortunate, but at least nobody makes such a big deal out of it as it is with hip-hop.

Wagner

Wagner’s antisemitism and use of his works by the Nazis caused him to be banned in Israel: he’s not played on Israeli radio, and playing him in a classical music concert is a sure way to be booed and to be mentioned on the front page in the next day’s newspapers.

As far as i know, Wagner had sick opinions, but didn’t kill anyone.

Now: Will “Let It Be”, “Imagine” and “Jealous Guy”, produced by an alleged murderer, be banned from Israeli radio? Or from BBC? I think not.

All lost in the tide

What do you get if you search for Soundgarden’s “Pretty Noose” video? The “Alternate Version” – the one where the band just performs. So the song is awesome, but the interesting original video is not on YouTube.

But what’s interesting is what appears in “Related Videos”. After a bunch of Soundgarden videos you get: Radiohead – Creep; Weezer – Say it Ain’t So; Roxette – Listen to Your Heart.

At this point i am supposed to write a Russian cuss word, but actually i can’t deny that Marie Fredriksson looks a lot like Thom Yorke. I’d love to say that it ain’t so, but it is too.

You never wash up after yourself

Hello, World.

World, you owe me. Not too much—about fifty bucks. But you still owe me.

You see, World, i’ve been listening to Radiohead since the second “You’re so fucking special” was played on Israeli Educational TV for the first time. When “Pablo Honey”, “The Bends” and “OK Computer” were released, i was a penniless teenager. Few of my friends listened to such music and those who did like it, were penniless teenagers, too, and didn’t have the CD’s. And, believe it or not, there were no MP3’s to download then. I only knew the songs from the videos on MTV, but did’t hear “Black Star”, “Planet Telex”, “You” or “Exit Music”.

Long story short, by 2000 i finally bought all those CD’s. I even became so rich, that i bought “Kid A” the day it was released.

What’s the problem then? The rest. With every album that they released, Radiohead released a separate companion EP. And these companion EP’s were good, too. And they were almost as expensive as the albums. For some time i didn’t buy them, because i hardly had the money to buy the albums. Later i was sure that EMI ere about to re-release them in some way. Then i stopped seeing them in record stores. Hey, i stopped seeing record stores—they began to get closed one after the other.

And then i saw those EP’s somewhere, and i had some spare money and i gave up and bought them—”My Iron Lung EP”, “How am I Driving EP”, “Com Lag EP”. Excellent music—”The Trickster”, “Permanent Daylight”, “Pearly”, “Palo Alto”.

Mere weeks later, bang: Radiohead’s First Three Albums Reissued and Expanded.

Well, yes, those tracklists have the complete EP’s and then some: “Molasses”, “Talk Show Host”, “Pop is Dead” and “Killer Cars” are all great and hard-to-find songs. And i am going to buy that crap, because i am the sucker that keeps the CD industry alive. But damn it, i don’t know what is it in me that makes record companies re-release albums days after i, of all people, buy myself a copy. It happened to me with Bob Dylan, Pavement, R. E. M. and Arik Einstein, but somehow with Radiohead it’s especially painful.

So there. I guess that i had to buy those EP’s to have them re-released so you, World, would be able to pay less than i paid and get more than i got.

Fuck justice. Fuck EMI. Fuck Radiohead. Fuck money.

P.S. At least i didn’t buy “Seven Television Commercials”. Go-go, YouTube.

Rename

“In the 16th century nobody cared who composed. I like it. It was just the orchestra, completely faceless and nameless. What i do now, with iPod and iTunes and stuff like that, i just rename everything with really surrealist poetic names.” (Daevid Allen)

Made Me Cry – Illusions

MTV launched a website with a lot of videos – http://www.mtvmusic.com. Until now i would watch videos on YouTube and quite often i’d get the “unavailable” error, because MTV would request YouTube to remove content for funny copyright reasons. Hopefully there will less of that crap now. (Now, if only Flash was True Free Software…)

As i opened mtvmusic.com for the first time, i was very pleasantly surprised by the videos at the top. Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” is an obvious joke—”Rickrolling” lovers must have quickly caught on to the new website. And Britney at the top is the exception rather than the rule. The rest, however, is pure classic bliss: “Once in a Lifetime”, “Legs”, “Take On Me”, “Money for Nothing”, and the one that just had to make me cry: “Under Pressure”.

One disappointing thing is that only seems to include video clips and not other MTV classics, such as the Unplugged concerts. You can still watch the whole of Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam Unplugged sessions on YouTube, though.

And why is this post called “Illusions”? Because if you open an account there, you’ll have to sign an agreement saying that you allow MTV “to edit, mix, combine, merge, distort, superimpose, create or add special effects, illusions and/or other material to or of all or any portion of your User Content”. If they allow me to watch Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube” in exchange, i don’t mind letting them use my content in illusions.

Livingstone

Don’t believe media lies, Ken Livingstone is an evil cunt.

(Mogwai, All Tomorrow’s Parties 2000)

Intellectual Property – Moscow ‘80

Funny.

“China Daily” is the official English newspaper of the government of the People’s Republic of China. China, quite naturally, is obsessed with the Olympics, so the China Daily website has an Olympic section. This is mostly well and good.

There is a “Past Games” link there. Click it. Then click on “1980 – Moscow”. What would you expect to find there? Great achievements of the Chinese sportsmen? No can do, China boycotted Moscow ‘80; isn’t that ironic.

What you will find there is, arguably, the most memorable and wildly positive thing about that event—the “Farewell, Misha” song.

But wait a second … didn’t i mention it once? Why of course i did. And they copied my translation word for word.

Aloud

I already mentioned this brilliant song—Arcade Fire’s “No Cars Go”.

And i already mentioned reading rock lyrics aloud.

Try this. Read aloud the lyrics of “No Cars Go”. Important: If you know the melody and the beat, forget them and just read it:

We know a place where no planes go,
We know a place where no ships go,

Hey!
No cars go.
Where we know.

We know a place no space ships go,
We know a place where no subs go

Where we know.

Go! — Don’t go!

Us kids know
No cars go
Where we know.

Hey!

It’s totally Dr. Seuss.

Wish

An open letter to Amazon.com:

Hi,

I’ve been shopping with Amazon.com since about 2002 and now i suddenly see that my order history and wish list are completely gone. My order history is empty and my wish list, which used to have about 20 pages of CD’s and books that i planned to buy now only has 3 CD’s that i added to it today. (Dengue Fever, a superb band i discovered today.)

Can you please restore it? I guess that i can live without the history of spending my hard-earned money, but that wish list was a work of art on which i worked for years and i am shocked to see it disappearing into the limbo without any warning.

Thanks.

Dengue

Dengue Fever – Sni Bong (Flash)

This is the first time i hear Cambodian music, but actually only the girl is Cambodian, and she sings mostly in Khmer, but the guys are, non-surprisingly, Jewish. I don’t have much to say about them, except that they are damn good.

Read more about Dengue Fever in Wikipedia.

Thanks to Shahar for the link.

Lo

I should be ignoring this, but i can’t.

There’s this Eurovision Song Contest thing, right? And Israel participates in it? And the Israeli songs are terrible, just as nearly all the rest, right? And it’s not really about music, but about some fake national pride and a particularly stupid television show, right?

Well, yes, it is.

This year it’s the same crap as every time. The singer’s name was shortened from Boaz Mauda to Boaz. They do it to many Israeli artists for marketing reasons. Crap. OK, i can live with that and i couldn’t care less. And of course they translated the song to English, which is also very pointless, but i can live with that, too. But on the official website they named this so-called song “Fire in Your Eyes (Ke’ilo Kan)” and this i can’t stand.

It’s this Israeli stupidity in its worst. It’s supposed to be written “Ke’ilu”. כאילו. In Hebrew the sounds of [o] and [u] are usually written with the same letter, vav, and the correct pronunciation can be easily guessed by people who know Hebrew. But when transliterating Hebrew to Latin characters Israelis carry this confusion over, and often write an O where they should have written a U and vice versa. It’s similar to a hamburger place i saw once in southern Tel Aviv, which had a big ugly handwritten sign in “English” saying HMBORGR. The A and the E are gone, because they are not written in Hebrew at all, and the U turned to an O, because it’s “the same letter”. Now i think that a stupid hamburger vendor in southern Tel-Aviv should pay a heavy fine for that transgression. What is the appropriate punishment for the “representative” of Israeli culture that can’t fucking spell transliterated Hebrew words?

Now comes the funny part: If i try to change it in Wikipedia, it may be reverted, and someone will say “give me reliable sources; the website says Ke’ilo”. Crap.

Almost Made Me Cry – Chicken

Driving alone on Kvish 6. Putting on I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One. That’s right, the album that opened my “Made Me Cry” series.

I already expect that i’ll cry of happiness from listening to this brilliant record.

And then i see a truck of cows that are going to die. No happiness.

And then i also realized that the opening track is titled “Return to Hot Chicken”. Great. Everything is broken.

Actually i should try to suppress and forget this stupid experience.

Josephine

Everyone who wants to do anything serious about music—that includes mere listening—must read Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”.

Waits

And another musician quote – Tom Waits, 1985:

‘If I want a sound, I usually feel better if I’ve chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it. Most things you can get with a button nowadays. So if I was trying for a certain drum sound, my engineer would say: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, why are we wasting our time? Let’s just hit this little cup with a stick here, sample something (take a drum sound from another record) and make it bigger in the mix, don’t worry about it.” I’d say, “No, I would rather go in the bathroom and hit the door with a piece of two-by-four very hard”.’

YOU magazine (The Mail On Sunday supplement, UK?), by Pete Silverton.

Cats on the Wing 2

“If you told the truth, that was all well and good,
And if you told the un-truth, well, that’s still well and good.” (Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume One)

Dogs

The highlights of the chart of the most downloaded Classic Rock tracks on Amazon.com:

• Number 01: The Wall by Pink Floyd. Go on, listen to them on your stupid iPod Shuffle, mixing Vera Lynn with One of My Turns with In the Flesh, when what you really wanted was Another Brick. And that’s if you put nothing but The Wall on your iPod, but you probably put 5000 other songs there, so you get those songs in between others, which have totally nothing to do with The Wall. Congratulations—you are an iAsshole. Of course, you could also listen to it in your stupid Windows Media Player, which is very helpful at showing you where The Happiest Days of Our Lives ends and Another Brick part II begins. If you don’t understand what i mean, you are lucky.
• Number 02: Pop Up by Yelle. What by what?
• Number 10: Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd ($7.99); Number 23: Dark Side of the Moon (2003 Remaster) by Pink Floyd ($8.99). If you downloaded number 10, see what i wrote above about The Wall. If you downloaded number 23 and payed one dollar more for it, the you are a truly unbelievable idiot, because you paid extra for an album that was in the first place one of the most meticulously recorded pieces of music ever, and in 2003 was remastered for playing on special high definition players, and then was converted to a lossy format, which pretty much throws all that sound quality out the window. But you are a part of a rather big group, because 23 is still a pretty high ranking. A study should be conducted on this group, trying to understand—what the fuck causes people to do such stupid things. It will surely win an Ig Nobel.
• Number 19: Communism Is Fascism by Undercover Slut. See number 02.
• Number 39: August & Everything After by Counting Crows. Classic Rock, anyone?
• Number 42: 1984 by Van Halen. I ain’t the worst that you’ve seen. Oh can’t you see what I mean? Might as well jump. Jump! Go ahead, jump. Jump!

Who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
Who thought they were growing old and cried,
Who sang out of their windows in despair,
Who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey,
Who conversed about America and Eternity, a hopeless task.

Poland

Poland is paralyzed by unprecedented riots over … legalization of abortion … or trade unions … or something.

The news on all TV stations show people blocking streets and impossibly huge traffic jams.

A particularly dramatic shot showed a semitrailer getting out of the jam and desperately falling from a mountainous highway to the sea. The truck drowned, of course, but the driver got out somehow, and in an interview he said that he fully supports the protesters.

Interpol (Flash) wrote a song about it, called “What the Fuck?”

The great part about all of this is that since it came to me in a dream, i can perform this song as my own.

Reality – Which one’s Pink?

There’s no business like show business.

Some salesman put Pink Floyd and Sarit Hadad on one banner, which advertises a DVD sale.

In Wikipedia there are articles in eight languages about Sarit Hadad. This seemed weird at first, but the reason for that is probably that she appeared in the Eurovision song contest. Reading about Hadad in German and Hungarian is very sobering, even though i don’t understand either of those languages.

Made Me Cry – Accordian

Someone searched for “learn to play accordian no cars go”.

For an explanation, see Hey.

Made Me Cry – Nikita

My nephew Nikita came to Israel to spend the summer with his grandparents – my parents. It was all fun, until two days before his flight back to Moscow he was hospitalized in Rambam with a bad case of peritonitis.

So his flight is postponed, of course. A week after the operation he can still hardly eat and walk. My parents sit at his bed in the hospital twenty-four seven and they are terribly tired, so i came to help them.

Today i sat with him for a few hours. He mostly slept. The TV was on with a low volume and i watched Music 24 (nonstandard¹), the Israeli music channel.

The golden age of the music video has ended in about 1996. Back then MTV was the undisputed Master of the Universe and local videos, although very low-budget, aspired to the international big brother and had a lot of character. These days, however, nearly all Israeli music videos can be grouped into three sets:

1. The singer is walking around the streets of Tel Aviv. And it’s the same couple of streets in all of them.
2. The singer is walking around his rented apartment in Tel Aviv, makes coffee, watches TV, talks on the phone or goes down to the street to buy cigarettes.
3. A huge close-up on the singer’s face. Obviously, this group is the most disgusting. I guess that too many video directors fell in love with Sinéad or – worse – with Alanis (Flash²).

By a rough count, nine out of ten videos falls into one of these, which is quite astonishing and depressing. It can ruin even good songs. But there are exceptions.

Eviatar Banai’s video for “Yesh li sikuy” (Flash) is a quiet little masterpiece of music video making. The song itself is one of the all-time masterpieces of Israeli music; It is from Banai’s debut album. It’s black and white and it shows people in a bar lip synching to the song, subtly conveying the mood of the line they are singing. (Can you spot Banai himself there?)

Somewhere in the middle of the song there are those lines:

אמא שרה לבן בלילה,
אמא כאן לידך כל הזמן.

Mummy sings to the son in the night,
Mummy’s here near you all the time.

In the video a pregnant woman is singing the last line. You can hardly notice that she’s pregnant until she touches her belly. This subtlety is pure beauty.

I guess that it would make me cry even without the unfortunate circumstances, but sitting there in the hospital near sleeping Nikita while his mother was far away in Moscow did put things into a perspective.

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I started writing this entry a few days ago. It was a pretty crazy bunch of days since then.

Nikita’s mother – my sister – Olga finally came to Israel today after fighting with travel agencies for a few days. His health became better.

Yesterday i bought him Gossip’s Standing in the Way of Control, a CD for which he was looking for months, in Moscow and in Israel. Finding it wasn’t easy. He was particularly happy to receive it, which may have contributed to his slowly improving health, too. Despite his current condition, i envy him; i don’t think that i shall ever be as touched by music as i used to be when i was his age.

Anyway, for the night he put it in a drawer next to his hospital bed and in the morning it wasn’t there. There is a slight chance that with all the fuss around him the CD was just misplaced and will be found, but everybody is sure that it was stolen.

I’m amazed. What a terrible scumbag someone must be to steal a rare CD from a sick child. I mean, i would at least understand the motivation if it was something famous, but even i hardly know this band, so what kind of a low life would want to steal it? He can get – what? – 20 NIS for it in a used CD store? Fukker.

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¹ Actually, the site seems to be mostly functional, but the videos use CastUp technology, which is IE-only. I never managed to install the Firefox plugin they offer, and even if it would work, it would only work on Windows. By the way, i (still) work for the company that recently announced the acquisition of CastUp. What do you know…

² Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” is not on YouTube. Alanis’ Head over Feet video is still there…

Bop

Remember the nineties?

Remember a mega-huge hit song with very little discernible lyrics called MMMBop?

Look what became of it: Stop the bop.

Actually i would be honored if my song would be used for such a thing.

I Gotta Move

Oh no.

He came from my home town
He was a prophet
Some kids they put him in the ground
Got coffee
Got donuts
Got wasted
Erased head
And what do they say?
He’s not afraid of the present tense
And talking back is a bad defense
I gotta move
I gotta break
I gotta get me cross the lake
I gotta move

Bother.

MY EARS!

I went to The Stooges concert on Saturday.

The show was excellent. Iggy did all his crazy antics without a shirt. Mike Watt was super-cool and had a little anchor pendant (he comes from a family of sailors).

But the sound was too loud. I didn’t feel it for the most of the time, except the end. But after the show my ears started ringing. Which is perfectly after a rock show. But they keep ringing until now – two days later. A lot of people are complaining about it – see the talkbacks on NRG and YNet.

No more rock shows without earplugs.

I always thought that only wussies put earplugs on a rock show. From now on i strongly prefer to be wussy than to have permanent damage inflicted on my ears. I really hope that this will pass.

Defective Defective

Some music CD’s are sold with a technology called Copy Control, which is supposed to be a kind of CRAP (DRM). Some people don’t like those CD’s and refuse to buy them. The Free Software leader Richard M. Stallman is one of those people, of course. Usually he provides strongly philosophical and hard-to-read explanations for his ideas, but in this case his reasoning is very practical and simple. In his account of his trip to Spain RMS writes:

My hosts gave me several records of bagpipe music, one of which I like fairly well, and one of which I haven’t heard yet because I left it in a car in Italy. But the most important one was the Hevia record. It’s important because I had to refuse it. It was a Corrupt Disk, with Digital Restrictions Management, and presumably impossible to copy. As soon as I saw this, I gave it back to my hosts, and asked them to take it back to the store, so that the record company could not keep their money. I would have been glad to listen to Hevia’s music, but not on a Corrupt Disk.

A “CD” that I cannot copy is of no use to me. I always travel with a bunch of records so that I can offer my hosts the chance to listen. A year ago, when my backpack was stolen, I learned to bring only copies, not originals. If I can’t copy a CD, I can’t travel with it, so I don’t want it.

The funny part is that he writes: “presumably impossible to copy” and doesn’t tell that it’s outright impossible. This is very true: From my experience i never had any problem to listen to CD’s marked as “Copy Control” or to copy them. I own some: Goldfrapp’s Black Cherry, Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, Beastie Boys’ Solid Gold Hits. I could copy all of them to my hard drive as lossless FLAC or WAV files, which can be later burned to a CD. I could listen to them in my car, and the CD player in my car is pretty bad.

Later in his article Stallman adds: “DRM attacks our freedom, and it attacks free software (since free software cannot access such media).” Well, it is wrong: I could play and copy those CD’s on Ubuntu without proprietary drivers.

So i don’t really understand what this technology does and why do record labels waste their money on it. I do know that those CD’s run some program when they are inserted into a computer running Windows, using Windows’ Autoplay feature. The software is a kind of a dumbed-down media player, which seems to play the music in a lossy format – MP3 or some other audio format with CRAP – which really fucks the honest customer who bought the CD’s, ‘cuz he payed for CD quality and gets to listen to a lossy file. This application probably also locks the CD drive, so it can’t be easily read or burned. It is not a problem for me, though – every time i use a computer with Windows one of the first things i do is turning off Autoplay’ing of CD’s. As far as i know, turning off Autoplay is not illegal, but then maybe in the US it is illegal under the DMCA.

You gotta fight for your right to party – but you don’t need to avoid CD’s just because they carry the Copy Control mark.

To make things clear, if i would have any practical problems playing them in my computer or CD player, i would return them to the store.

Get It

I was looking for a way to write down our songs in a way that the whole band will easily understand. Musical notation would be overkill – i needed a simple “map” of every song that will describe it as song parts – intro, bridge, verse, chorus, coda, etc., and instrument parts – guitar, piano, drums, and comments such as play slower here, play louder there etc. MIDI is good for describing music to computers, not people. Cubase is good for recording, but not for printing – except maybe notation scores, but i don’t need that. I tried writing it as a table in a word processor and found out that it was bad at the middle of the intro to the first song.

So i thought about making up some XML format and writing a Perl script that will convert it to PDF, HTML or some other printable and readable representation. And then i found out that what i really need is XSLT which does just that – transforms XML to other formats.

I kept hearing about XSLT everywhere, so i thought that now would be a good time to finally start using it. I read some articles and tutorials about it and most of them said that XSLT works like Lisp. So i recalled Eric Raymond’s article about becoming a hacker:

“Other languages of particular importance to hackers include Perl and LISP. Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; it’s very widely used [...]

LISP is worth learning for a different reason – the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it.”

(I think that there are more and better reasons to learn Perl, but i shall put that aside now.)

I tried to follow Raymond’s advice and study Lisp since about 1998. Yesterday i started getting it for the first time, with the help of Cygwin, Guile and this fine tutorial by Dorai Sitaram. The experience is enlightening indeed.

If you ever tried studying functional programming and gave up – try it again. It took me nine years to get it, and chances are that you are smarter than i am.

A Letter to eMusic

eMusic are more or less the good guys of the online digital music business. They are cheap, they sell “good” music – jazz, indie, progressive, avantgarde. They sell high-quality MP3 files and they don’t use CRAP (DRM). They give quite a lot of music for free. All that wasn’t enough for me, though. Still, i really wanted to give them a chance and offered them an opportunity to exploit me. Here’s the letter i sent them:

Hi there,

This “bad feedback” is totally subjective. As the famous break-up line goes, “it’s not you, it’s me”.

You see – i just don’t like to listen to MP3’s. Even if i love the music, i just don’t experience quite the same excitement when i listen to a file on my computer as i do when i listen to a CD or a record or even a magnetic tape.

CD’s, records and tapes are something that i can touch and hold in my hands; MP3’s are just files. I just don’t like them so much. Even if i get them for free, i don’t *enjoy* listening to them.

I downloaded WinAmp and tried your generous free 50 MP3’s offer. I found a lot of great music – Trail of Dead, the Microphones, Stephen Malkmus. The music’s great! And the subscription price is fair! Really! But as i listened to Malkmus’ great “Face The Truth” i wanted to read the CD booklet. But i didn’t have it – i just had a bunch of MP3’s. Even if i would be able to read the whole of the booklet online, i wouldn’t enjoy it half as much as reading a printed one. And no, i don’t want to print one at home – buying good paper and ink would cost me more than buying a CD. And i don’t want to listen to a burned CD. It just disgusts me. I want the original CD and i will probably go to a CD store and buy it. Which is a kind of a rip-off, ‘cuz i already payed for the *music*. Again – it’s not eMusic’s fault; it’s my crazy completism.

But why won’t you make profit out of it? Consider this possibility: I download a whole album on eMusic. If i like it, i can buy a discounted CD at some online CD store. I’d love it! I get access to a lot of good legal music downloads, the record company gets what it wants, eMusic gets subscription fees.

I tried looking for something like it at your website, but couldn’t find it. If there IS something like it and i missed it, please tell me! ‘Cuz if there isn’t, i will, unfortunately, have to cancel my subscription.

Thanks for understanding.

Here’s their reply:

Hello:

Thank you for contacting eMusic Customer Support.

Thank you for taking the time out for the feedback, I will be sure to pass it onto our content and marketing departments for their information.

If you are using the most current version of turned, there is a feature that automatically adds artwork to your albums if the artwork is available online.

If you do not receive artwork with your downloads, you can import album artwork from our site into turned to ensure that the album artwork will appear when playing songs. Here are the steps:

1. Launch tunes. Make sure you’ve already added your tracks to your tunes library.

2. Make sure you are set to “Browse” mode by clicking the eye on the upper right hand corner.

3. Locate the album you’d like to add artwork to by first locating the artist in the Artist column and then locating the album title in the Album column.

4. Click once to highlight the album title.

5. Locate the appropriate artwork on the eMusic album page. With your left mouse button, select the image and *hold down* your mouse button.

6. Drag the image to the lower-left corner of turned labeled “Drag Album Artwork Here”. (If it says “Now Playing” then click the bar for it to display “Drag Album Artwork here.”)

7. When you see a “+” sign in the window, release your mouse button. The artwork you selected will appear in the window and will now appear for each track of the album you selected.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

eMusic’s MP3s are nowVRR-encoded using the encoder LAME 3.96. Our MP3s are not restricted in any way.

OurVRR-encoding ranges from 32kbs to 320kbs, averaging around 192bpss. A portion (

Please see the following help section article for further information:

http://www.emusic.com/help/technical.html#q10

The ID3 tags we use are version 1.0 and version 2.3.

We do not currently include the release year in our tags but hopefully should be adding it soon.

Please let us know if we can be of further assistance

Regards,

Carlos

eMusic Customer Support Team

What’s to say? First, it’s automated. They didn’t really bother to read my letter. They thought that i’m just another stupid American who can’t figure out how to download files. I wanted to give them an opportunity to use my weaknesses and take my money. They didn’t want it.

Furthermore, i’ve got a strong hunch that Carlos isn’t a real person. In the past i received replies from several customer service representatives named Carlos in different organizations. I doubt that it’s a coincidence. Might it be the default name for some CRM bot?

If you happen to be an entrepreneur, please go on and use me. I meant every word of that letter.

People are a problem

Making the world a better place is hard. In the last few days i sent OGG files of our music to two people with simple instructions on downloading the OGG codec and both of them said that they couldn’t hear them.

People don’t like downloading codecs. That’s why porn sites often say something like: “There’s no need to download any codecs to watch our videos!”

People don’t realize that they can be sued for using MP3.

Now what can i do about it?