Lala + Pitchfork Redux

I’ve written before that streaming music while you’re reading about or learning about music is the killer application and the culmination of what people have been talking about for streaming, at least as it relates to sitting at your desk. 

This has come home to me particularly powerfully in the wake of Pitchfork’s recent release of their Top 50 Albums of the Year for 2009.  Working from home, focused on the stuff that pays my bills and gives me satisfaction of a different sort than making music, I click my browser over to P4K and start catching up on all the records that I missed this year for this reason or that.  Some good computer speakers with a decent amount of bass and I’m set.

The experience would be/could be better if I had a true hi-fi system set up.  And I’m not sure the fidelity of the streams themselves although I could find out with some effort. 

But the point is that, for free, I can absorb whole albums of music at a time and give myself the time to digest them and consider them.  I think LaLa puts a limit on me listening over and over so at some point I’ll either need to pay something or stop listening.  Still, it’s a great solution.

At least as a consumer.  And as a reflection of a new paradigm for music whereby the recorded music is essentially marketing for other revenue streams.

But as a fun of music, this is working very well for me.  I finally had a chance to listen to Bitte Orca and can hop on the bandwagon.  It was strange but incredibly intelligent and, somehow, still had more guts and balls, despite it’s femininity, than Veckatimest. 

I’ve constructed a series of totally arbitrary rules as I work through the Top 50 list.  Namely, that I can’t skip any tracks in an album but must listen through start to finish for any record that I start.  So far, I’m through Bitte Orca (#2), The XX (#3), the latest Cass McCombs record (#49) and halfway through the new Doom LP (#48).

Other thoughts:

- Do I sound like a cliche if I say I’m not sure about the year in music?  It could be a function of the “grower” affect but a lot of the music isn’t grabbing me.  Bitte Orca, even on computer speakers, leapt into my ears.  I get that.  I get Merriweather Post Pavilion.  There’s a lot on that Top 10 list that I simply don’t get, often after multiple attempts.

- User generated content is largely crap and I believe in human intervention.  Maybe I’m a luddite.  But I don’t really want to hear random people’s LaLa play lists.  I want to hear Pitchfork’s.  They have a brand. They’ve established some trust with me, despite their snootiness.  This seems emblematic of the broader Web to my mind.  I want curation.  I want a guide.  I want someone I trust to lead me to the promised land.  And it takes a lot to earn my trust.  Or yours.  That’s why we still need magazines, and record labels, and taste makers.  The world and the Internet and our culture is a dense thicket of brambles and I need someone with a good machete even if they’re sometimes a snob and bad writers and are lecturing me about the Beatles or Steve Reich or writing a long essay about Eno when they were born in the 90s.  Even with all that.  I need their machete.  They’ve honed it and built it and it’s a good machete.

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