Black Friday for me involved staying home avoiding the masses, and other than looking for a food disposal to replace mine which stopped working the day before Thanksgiving, I did not even begin to shop for the holidays. I have not yet decided what to get anyone for Christmas this year, so I guess I better start shopping soon. I did however purchase a few days of pure pleasure for me on Amazon. iTunes has free songs each week. Amazon music has free songs AND entire free albums.
Most of the free albums on Amazon are music samplers from various music publishers, but so far, everything I have downloaded from classical to world music has been music that I would listen to at length. While the process can be a bit tedious and the system does not warn you when you have already purchased (grabbed, snatched, taken) an album which sometimes leads to a double download of a particular selection, it can easily be cleaned up after they make their way into iTunes with the display duplicates function. Since my Black Friday raid on the free music on Amazon, I have been listening to a variety of artists I likely would never have experienced.
Which is exactly what the free music push-outs on iTunes and Amazon would like.
I like some new artists I probably would not have sought out on my own, but now that I am familiar with them, I am much more likely to search out something they have for sale on one of the music sites.
I have not played with the Amazon cloud player enough yet, but have played with the iTunes program enough to know that I like having a wide variety of music available at nearly any time. It comes in handy at work when I cannot count on otherwise streaming music to fill my office and have to rely on the radio.
Fortunately there is a classical music station I pick up most of the time.
Not long ago, I relied on the radio for the majority of my musical exposure, but in the last six years, I have hardly listened to commercial music. With friends posting music on social media, the period of time I had satellite radio, and now with the streaming music sources, I hardly turn on the radio more than to get my daily news fix in the morning and evenings.
I am happy with the much broader variety of music I get now than ever before – and the much broader selection than I can get from the broadcast stations in Austin. Honestly, I cannot slam them too much because I have not listened to them in such a long time, I could not tell you the format of any but the local NPR station and local classical music station. I stopped listening to them for a reason, and the few times I have turned one or the other on, I heard nothing new that made me want to come back on a regular basis.
For the time being, I am going to continue taking advantage of the music to which I have access via social media, streaming music stations, and the other random sources.
And I’m going to continue growing my music library whenever I can.
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