ORLY? We're adrift in a sea of free music. Spotify, SoundCloud, Youtube. And that's the stuff you opt into. Muzak blaring from the Abercrombie, One Direction with your Pepsi, ringtones on the bus, a million jingles selling a million things you neither want nor need. Generations were defined by their music collections. Those albums in the rack, those CDs in the stack, that was you. And while we're slouching towards a Spotify list defining who and what we are, there remains something sacred about that carefully curated collection of cuts that you permit into your pocket. That shit is yours, man. Yeah, other people listen to Taylor Swift. Yeah, other people even listen to Taylor Swift ironically. But not that many people listen to Taylor Swift ironically and that Fleet Foxes EP that your only cool cousin downloaded for you. Your choice in music is emblematic of your choice in everything and all of a sudden, Apple jammed a steaming bolus of geezer rock down into your goddamn DNA. The actual value of music is effectively nil. Any premium service will permit you to dip into the limitless well for pennies a day. I think I torrented 90GB worth of flac files during the recent what freeleech. But the shit I torrented? I torrented it on purpose. Except for, well, that Frost in Norway: Is not the same as Frost in Hungary.I couldn't believe how many people spent actual time in their actual lives complaining about free music.
Okay, point conceded. They were complaining about the small invasion of privacy. And probably the potential for future, larger invasions. But really in the end it's a goddamned U2 album. They used to be a good band! People were talking about dropping Apple. Dropping Apple. That's prioritizing your head straight into your own ass, right there. I don't know, man, my ipod's broken. Hasn't talked to the cloud in like a year and a half. I found about that shit on facebook. Then I snatched the album off what, probably.
Sayre's Law, dude. The less it matters the more pissy people get about it. Last U2 album I listened to was Achtung Baby. Still a damn fine album. So when Apple says "have a free U2 album!" I'm like, "okay." It actually took me 2 days to download it, about half an hour of puttering. And then I was like "...huh."