Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Napster made me buy my guitar

Last night during a marathon guitar lesson I and the instructor had a short discussion about Napster and downloading songs off the internet. I had mentioned that I downloaded many of the songs that we are learning of iTunes, but got tired of paying $1 a piece for them so I grabbed a bunch from bittorrent (for instructional use only, I promise not to enjoy them). While on the subject I said "I guess I'm in this class because of Napster".

You see, a long time ago, on a workstation far far away I used to run gnapster (a Linux client) to get songs to listen to while working (this is back in the pre-corperate Napster hay-day). One December day, as Christmas approached I did a simple napster search for "Christams" and a Dave Matthews song "Christmas Song" came up. It was off the "Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds Live at Luther College" CD. I was really intrigued by the unique Matthews sound so I downloaded a few more Dave Matthews songs. Cool stuff.

Later I purchased the full CD (yeah, I do that, it was actually 2 CDs). Its an awesome collection of music and I highly recommend people jump out and buy. After listening to Dave and Tim I got this creeping notion that I too could play guitar. It was a slow festering sort of idea that laid dormant for several years. During that time I purchased more guitar oriented music. I added more James Taylor, John Denver (and old favorite, his "Wilderness Concern" rules) and Paul Simon to my music collection. Last year I finally asked for a guitar for my birthday.

My guitar arrived almost a year ago. I then went about buying song books, how-to DVDs, picks, capos and paying for lessons. Its started to amount to a large amount of money and I'm starting to eye electric guitars in the music store. It can only get worse.

Last night I purchased a CD recorded by my guitar instructor's band. Had I not been in his lessons I would never have bought this CD because I wouldn't have known about it.

Long story short--the evil Napster, a technology which was supposed to destroy music sales and kill the industry sold a CD last night....and a guitar...and a pile of song books...a couple of learning guitar DVDs...24 weeks of guitar lessons...

2 Comments:

Blogger Mark Zuniga said...

so, how is the little one?

7:07 AM  
Blogger Carl said...

Pictures (and perhaps updates sometime) can be found at:
http://unlhepcl.unl.edu/alison

12:10 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home