Amazon's MP3 Download Store

Amazon just released their MP3 Download Store, and so far, it's been pretty awesome. While browsing, I actually found music I like, by artists who aren't exactly mainstream. ILS and Thunderball were in there, even with some of their newer albums. The Itunes Store has these CD's, but for $3 more and loaded with Apple's FairPlay DRM crapware. They're also sold at Itunes' standard 128kbps AAC encoding, as opposed to Amazon's 256kbps mp3s.

I've downloaded one song and one album off Amazon's service. They give you a free song for signing up ("Energy" by The Apples in Stereo -- subtle jibe, eh?) and I bought a cd of ILS remixes. 35 tracks of excellent breakbeats for $8.99 - beat that, RIAA. The download times have been surprisingly fast (about 5 minutes later it's downloading track #26, and I'd guess their servers are getting slammed today), and the quality is pretty good. Maybe not up to Beatport's DJ standards, but leagues better than what you'll find on typical p2p networks.

My only beef with this service is that Amazon requires us to download and install their downloading software. It's a small program (1.1MB on Mac), and it's well designed - pretty icons and an easy-on-the-eyes interface. The adding to iTunes is convienent, especially since the program leaves the mp3's themselves in an external folder for later reorganization. But it's still a little worrisome to have to install software to use a web service - Amazon's privacy agreement seems pretty straightforward, but do I really want to trust them with access to my applications folder?

I suppose for now, with excellent cheap, legal music at stake - the answer is yes.

Sampling Things

Palms Out Sounds:

...as you hear these tracks you'll either decide Daft Punk isn't as genius as you thought they were or that they're twice as amazing. I just know that for any Daft Punk fan out there- these tracks are essential. In other words, don't skip this one.

Palms Out Sounds exposes the not really hidden: Daft Punk are DJ's first, and master re mixers more than instrument builders or synth freaks. They show in their wonderful post songs like Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby," which were used extensively to create the main beat in Daft Punk's work.

I'm still struggling with the question of sampling - how much is appropriate, when it becomes "cheating" and if whether it's ever appropriate or ever wrong. Honestly, I'm starting to lean towards the "it's not cheating, it's good sense" argument. In the web programming world, we use a lot of frameworks like CakePHP, Django, and Ruby on Rails to avoid "reinventing the wheel." For the longest time I tried to avoid frameworks and scripts like Wordpress and Movable Types simply because I felt that using someone else's code for my projects was "cheating." And yet, that violates the entire principal of the open-source world: code should be shared, the wheel does not need 100 inventors.

So, what's different between code and music? Why should we be afraid of using samples to lay the groundwork for a song? As long as you are creating something new with it, is it really "cheating," or just skipping the tedious parts?

This also has a lot of implications for digital copyright. Boing Boing and company have fought for the "right to remix" for artists like DJ Danger Mouse, and have made great mention of the innovation they can bring to old ideas. I'm currently stuck on John B's album Electrostep, which remixes some great 80's tracks ("Hey Mickey", "Tainted Love") into a fusion of drum & bass and 80's that's highly original, and deathly enticing. Even if you support copyright, how could you draw the line between innovation and imitation?

So, I don't have any short, quick answers -- but I am tempted to whip out ACID and see what I can do with some of the obscure little tracks I love.

DJ Mix Things

What happens when I actually get a free hour? A (very) short DJ Mix, that's what. I need more projects like this - stuff I can do in an afternoon and be done with, rather than things which require continuous commitments of time.

Anyhow, enjoy 3 tracks of breaks & Electro. I won't say it's great, but it's a start, if I ever want to make mix CD's or get into DJing.