An old friend posted on Facebook, “Looking for some new, laid-back blues/folk music? The second album from TajMo (Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’), Room On The Porch, is out today!”
I flipped over to my Apple Music app, did a quick search for the album, and it was playing on my laptop in about 30 seconds.
Once upon a time, I would have scrawled the album title on a piece of paper, and the next time I rolled into town with some disposable income, maybe I would buy the album unless there were higher-priority albums on my buying list. The process might take weeks, months or years, if I ever did hear the album.
Nowadays, for 12 bucks a month I have access to almost all of the music ever recorded. In addition to the brand new stuff, I’ve been catching up with many of the albums I missed when they were new in the sixties and seventies. After seeing the A Complete Unknown movie, I went through Bob Dylan’s early catalog and felt pretty foolish not to have paid more attention to him at the time.
Don’t get me wrong, my favorite format for listening to music will always be vinyl. Sitting back with a 12-inch-square piece of artwork in my lap, preferably with a lyric sheet, and listening to the stylus navigate the grooves, is the way I learned to listen to music. My records have outlasted several other formats and still sound terrific a half-century or more later.
The downside of the subscription business model is the artists get a fraction of a penny when I play each song on their album as opposed to the somewhat more substantial royalty they receive when I buy their album. The upside is there potentially are millions of me, and those plays can add up.
The TajMo album is pretty darn tasty, maybe even tasty enough to buy a vinyl copy for when the cloud goes down or disappears. Twenty minutes earlier I didn’t even know the album existed. What a wonderful world.
One irony is that I’m preparing this blog entry while Sara Groves’ wonderful album Add to the Beauty plays on the turntable. It’s a Kickstarter reward celebrating the album’s 20th anniversary and, to my knowledge, only the second that Groves has released on vinyl since she started recording in 1998.
I own the album on CD and LP and I can also call it up on Apple Music. If I am blessed to live 20 more years, which version do you think I’ll be listening to?
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See the World! Podcast, Episode 5 — sponsored by See the World!, now available for pre-order.
