How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Music on the Internet.

Of course there were places to find out about music before the digital revolution. We bought Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, NME and the Georgia Strait to read record reviews. Word of mouth worked like "Hey did you hear the new Chilliwack record? It's wicked."

LP

It was clunky but word about great new music that wasn't in the mainstream did travel but I sure like it better now.

I've recently had two great experiences of how a simple Facebook post and a Google search put great music in my hands within minutes of coming to my attention.

For digital natives (born after the invention of email) it's pretty much a 'meh' experience but for we digital immigrants (who remember the world before email) it really is amazing how news about a new artist is lightning and how easy and quick it is to snap the music into your ipod.

One night I was poking around on Twitter and Facebook and my friend Helen posted this video on FB along with "You should see this." Boy am I glad I took her advice.



As soon as I watched this and tweeted it to friends, I went in search of her music to download. A name like LP makes Googling a bit of a challenge. I looked for her music on my subscription download service site first, emusic.com but no luck. I then checked iTunes and she has a five song EP that includes a video for each of her songs for $5.99 - Into the Wild (Live at East West Studios) EP  as well as a single. a studio version of the above song. And yes I also found her website. And what do you know, she also has an interview in Rolling Stone.

Funny thing too. The next day I was tweeting about her to a friend and damned if @lprock isn't now following me on twitter.

My second great online music experience was discovering this duo from Quebec called DobaCaracol and their song Etrange.

This time I heard it the old fashioned way, on CKUA. My 10 year old daughter and I were bopping to this song all the way to her school. The announcer's French was lousy, probably slightly better than mine, and I couldn't make out his pronunciation of the artist's name or the name of the song. 

Luckily I took note of the time I heard the song. The first chance I had I looked on CKUA.com to see if they uploaded their playlist for that day and they did. (Another good reason to donate money to them every few months when they have their fundraisers.) The artist DobaCaracol and song Etrange were listed and lo and behold a quick search on emusic.com turned up the record. It's called Soley. Downloaded it on the double. ---- They say good news travels fast. I say good music on the internet travels faster and I'm so glad it does.