#^d 2016-06-15 #^h Music Week

Music: Current count 26674 [26674] rated (+0), 447 [424] unrated (+23).

That is, nothing new rated in the last 15 days, while I've been busy driving around half of the the eastern half of the United States (KS, MO, IL, IN, KY, WV, MD, DE, NJ, NY, CT, MA, PA, OH, AR -- twice missed OK by only 1 mile). Took me a couple extra days to get this post together, so I can report the unpacking, way down below. Also didn't manage to buy a single CD -- I remember past trips of similar length where I brought back a hundred or more. As it was, the only record store I even saw was CDepot in College Park, Maryland: drove by and meant to return but didn't manage it. (I don't think I've ever been there without spending at least $200, so it would have been the one store to go to if I managed to go to one.) Still, I hardly ever buy things these days, so that streak would likely have fallen.

I got a rude awakening when I got back: All Music Guide has added some programming to prevent you (or at least me) from seeing any of their pages. Their gripe is that they've detected that I'm using Add Blocker, and they're insisting that either I disable it or "continue with a paid subscription." The $12 annual "ad-free" subscription is actually pretty modest considering how much I've used their website in the past, but the way they're going about this is pretty nasty. I also wonder what happens when they realize I'm also running NoScript and have 11 of their 15 JavaScript domains blocked -- all sorts of hideous, annoying, possibly dangerous shit.

So I balked, then turned to All About Jazz to at least get the musician lineup and song list on the album I was streaming, only to find that they want "$20 and we'll hide those six pesky Google ads that appear on every page for a full year!" That doesn't sound like nearly as good a deal. (OK, review-wise AAJ is a cut above AMG, but it's less useful discographically, harder to search, more confusing, and it's only jazz.) They also have a "sign up and become a member" feature, like (or unlike, I'm not sure) AMG introduced a while back. AAJ doesn't charge for membership -- looks like it mostly lets them spam you, and lets you contribute free data to them. But then I'm only allowing 6/12 AAJ script domains, and fear that funding their "website expansion" will add more to the clutter than to content or accessibility (I understand there are some cases where JavaScript might be useful, but all this promiscuous script cross-referencing is a plague on the web).

AMG and AAJ are valuable websites, and it can't be easy funding them. But they're also profit-making companies, and they are at least partly built on contributed content (no idea how much if anything they pay writers -- M. Ricci has offered to publish me but hasn't offered to pay me anything). So it's hard to say that adding new revenue streams will offer anything in return to anyone but the owners. And while some websites may be worth paying for, as a practical matter most people cannot afford or justify more than a few such subscriptions. I expect that the effect there is that those sites that succeed at subscriptions will crowd out any others. That may indeed be part of the rationale. But it should also make those sites less popular, and ultimately less valuable. I don't know what the answer is (other than the currently utopian one of publicly supported democratic sites; free markets work OK for rivalrous goods, but are pretty much impossible for non-rivalrous ones).

One thing I haven't tried yet is an "anti-adblock killer" like Reek. For one thing, it adds to the arms race between between sites that try to seize control of your browser running on your computer and your basic right to defend yourself against their attacks. For another, it seems to depend on Greasemonkey, a piece of possibly invidious technology that I've never gotten the hang of. (Basically, it allows you to write or use scripts that change the way your browser works, for better or perhaps more often worse.)

Two more bits of news on returning:

  1. I see that Rhapsody has decided to rename itself Napster, thereby throwing away all the free promo work I've done for the streaming service since 2007. They're promising the same service for the same rates, so this shouldn't be as disruptive as when they switched to Flash for their streaming layer (what a headache that was). But it probably means I'll change the name of my monthly compendium of music notes to something else, and almost certainly that won't be Napster Streamnotes.
  2. Speaking of profit-seeking websites, the people who gave you that free resume-sharing site LinkedIn are cashing in on all your data and loyalty to Microsoft for $26.2 billion. The likelihood that they're going to share any of that bounty with you is nil, and the chances the site will become any less parasitic or predatory aren't much better. This is, of course, just a bigger version of the fortune AMG and AAJ are aiming for, and it's easy to see their recent member programs and ad extortion as efforts to improve their market value -- i.e., as signs that the end is near. It may be time to start thinking about new website projects again.

Lots of ideas pop into my head while I'm driving. I met John Chacona in Erie, PA, and one thing he was interested in was what I was my music cases and what I was listening to on the road. I have two cases with 80 CDs each, plus one more with 40, so I usually take 200 with me. I used to load these things for each trip, but had gotten lazy and had only shuttled a few discs in and out each trip: the first things to go were current jazz I was working on, then I generally cut back on jazz and hip-hop, often in favor of old rhythm & blues, rock & roll, and country -- those seem to work best for driving, although I preferred jazz in the motel room back when I thought to bring a boombox along. (My wife's iPod would eliminate the need for the boombox, but she doesn't always come along.) So I resolved two things: one is to jot down a list of the CDs for this trip; the other is to unpack the cases when I get back, so I can start fresh next time. What follows is the list, with date/label data from the database (which doesn't always match the disc, especially in cases where the CD replaced an LP). Multiple disc sets are noted, and something like "1/3CD" means I only had one of three CDs.

Not necessarily the best 200 CDs I could have taken. There's some amount of accident and drift here, but they're all A- or better (often much better). I probably played a little more than half of these on this trip. I can't say as I was ever disappointed.

Unpacking: Found in the mail last couple of weeks: