I am now listening to a live version of a favorite ELO song on Spotify that I NEVER would have known existed, if not for Spotify.
Some swear by Rhapsody, others by Pandora – I Googled for comparisons and still feel I’ve settled into the right home.
I’ve followed a few friends there, and they have introduced me to new music that’s up my pop/smooth alley that I NEVER would have known existed if not for Spotify.
I am paying $10 a month, and Spotify’s postings indicate to me some of that money DOES go to the artists – for all I know, the same sliver that actually got to them from the albums, cassettes and CDs I’ve bought over the decades. I hope it’s even more.
All I miss are the liner notes/lyric sheets. The bios are nice, if brief. They have a lot of foreign/compilation albums by artists with outtakes/alternates etc. I again, never would have known existed if not for Spotify.
For example, had no idea Jeff Lynne has yet again returned to ELO and — like Chicago with its recent Nashville Sessions — they re-recorded their hits to, perhaps, make more direct-to-them digital lucre. Good for them! And for folks like me and my aging kindred spirits, because to hear the same artists still sounding great 40 years or so later is a hopeful godsend for someone who hopes his writing these days is as good as way back then — perhaps better, more seasoned in a way, as I still Ride the Tide of the Daily News.
Then there’s Evernote – I bought the ‘Evernote For Dummies’ book about it on my Nook (darn images are too small but otherwise…;-) I am not using it yet for more than just an always-synced, everywhere (4-5-6 devices) same set of notes without having to print them out or go deep-searching the PC. It’s also an idea-catcher, a to-do list that has bells and whistles I doubt I’ll ever use – heck, just to get things organized enough to organize the notes into notebooks and then stacks of notebooks SOUNDS so simple, but perhaps calls for a greater degree of organization than Messy Yours Truly will ever get to. But at least all those notes will be searchable forever more.
Put Evernote or some future version of it into the future version of Google Glass and an aging, dottering, forgetful Barney will never truly “forget” a thing – names will go with faces, and I can at least for a while “fake remembering.”
The Cloud Memory. The Great Collective. Both reassuring and a bit unnerving at the same time.
But I can’t re-record/post the old news. It’s sort of like Shakespeare or Picasso or Beethoven or The Beatles — some agent or such applauding over their latest masterpiece — and then immediately going, “Great stuff chaps! But what have you got new TODAY?” Always wanting more.
And while some of my tide-riding gets oh-so-dreadfully familiar, even routine after all those decades – crashes, crime, politics, etc. etc. – so much unhappy news, occasionally broken by wonderful good-news stories — at least no two days in my field are exactly the same, and you never know what’s going to come in over the transom (look it up) to change the rest of your day, week, maybe even month. Maybe even life.
Put THAT in your Evernote and remember it. Or let it remember for you!
(PS: Read just today – and I remember! – that they have found another 10 or so genes that deal with the memory Alzheimer’s eats away. It’s like a race against time – will they fix that awful theft of a disease before most of my generation is in its clutches? Only time will tell. I forget who said that first;-)
Leave it to Barney 