cubanlinks

The other night Taurus and I headed over to the 930 Club for the Jet show. I can always count on Taurus to do some legwork and grab tickets to great shows at 930. Now, the doors opened at 7:30pm but Jet wasn’t scheduled to come on until 10pm. I had never heard of the opening band (The Blue Van), so I wasn’t sure how early I wanted to get there.

Despite some second-guessing, we rolled over around 8pm. I like to head upstairs and grab a spot on the rail. Best way to catch a show there, unless you’re downstairs in the first row of crushed humanity against the stage. In any case, we staked a claim on the rail and waited for The Blue Van to come out.

Come out they did. They blew the doors off. I am not a music critic, but here’s what Pitchfork has to say about them:

“The Blue Van are more a controlled science experiment—what happens when four zealous Danes are brought up smack dab in the middle of nowhere listening almost exclusively to Kinks, Animals, Who, and Doors records?—than a fresh rock outfit. Their LP The Art of Rolling is an exhumed time capsule of 60s mod and psychedelica.”

I come home from the show think “I need to get my hands on some Blue Van tracks.” I checked out a couple BitTorrent sites but not much came up. Besides which, I’m getting pretty tired of BitTorrent lately (slow/no downloads, etc). I checked out iTunes. Bam, both albums, right there. Tracks for $0.99 and albums for $9.99. Not bad, but I didn’t pull the trigger. Sure, I liked the music live, but will the albums hold-up? Do I feel like spending $10 or $20?

Then I thought, what about eMusic? I had read alot about eMusic, but never bothered to check them out. Here’s what I found out:

• Sign-up for a free trial membership (14 days)
• Stick around and pay $10/month for 30 downloads ($0.30 a track)
• The music downloads as MP3 files (no DRM, no expiration, all good!)
• You choose from a selection of music from non-major, indie and foreign labels

That last point is pretty key. Looking for the latest U2 or Shakira album? Look elsewhere. eMusic is all about music sampling and discovery. After setting-up my account, I downloaded a couple of tracks from The Blue Van (you can sample tracks before you buy just like on iTunes), as well as some tracks from The White Stripes and Interpol. I’m honestly excited about this experiment is music purchasing. Will I download enough to make the subscription worthwhile? Will I find enough music to suit my tastes? I guess we’ll find out!