I like music a lot, and there are plenty of artists I like, appreciate, admire and love. But I really don’t consider myself a “fan”.

A whole while ago I had a ticket to go see [...]]]> I figured I should write this up since it’s been bouncing around in my brain for ages.

I like music a lot, and there are plenty of artists I like, appreciate, admire and love. But I really don’t consider myself a “fan”.

A whole while ago I had a ticket to go see Cat Power play a concert at a small theatre at the local university. There were two shows, and I think they were two hours apart – my ticket was for the 5:00pm show (I might be paraphrasing the actual time).

It was general admission, so I showed up semi-early to get a good seat.

Then I decided that standing in line with a bunch of smoking collage kids was silly so I went and waited at a coffee shop and came back about half an hour before the show. I assumed the doors would be open by then. They weren’t.

At 5:00pm, the doors were still not open. I asked other people in line if they knew what was going on, but nobody knew. Eventually I walked up to the doors and knocked until someone bothered coming out and telling us that the show was delayed and they wouldn’t be letting people in till 6:30pm.

At this point I asked if anyone wanted a free ticket, gave mine to the first person who didn’t think I was joking, and went home.

When I got home I thought it might be a good idea to post something to a local online forum to let people who might have tickets for the 8:00pm show know that there is no way that thing is starting on time. I did post that there was a huge huge delay, that the people running the theatre didn’t bother coming out and explaining anything and were content to let us all wait out in the rain.

Some people asked how come I hadn’t waited. I explained that I actually had stuff to do that day, and that standing outside in the rain with a bunch of people who were already pretty drunk and smoking all over the place was just not something I’m willing to do just to see a Cat Power concert.

People just couldn’t understand the reasoning and basically a flame-war erupted where people were giving me crap for leaving. One person commented (again, paraphrasing) that “…isn’t it funny how a little rain separates the TRUE fans from the wannabes?”

That’s really when it struck me – no, I’m not a fan.

The word “fan” is derived, for good reason, from the word “fanatic”. “Fans” are the people who buy every single album – including reissues, different versions of the same album, Japanese imports, whatever. They’re the ones who go to every single show. The ones who WILL wait out in the rain, the snow, the heat, whatever. The ones who scream when the show starts.

That’s just not me.

Here’s an example – there are not a lot of musicians I admire as much as Mark Knopfler. Guy’s a genius. I keep saying that if he was born 300 years ago, people would still be listening to Wolfgang Amadeus Knopfler. That’s the extent of his genius in my book. I was really disappointed when I missed his concerts twice before I finally managed to hear about them more than 24 hours before they took place and got tickets to see him.

I was obviously very excited to see Mark Knopfler play live. Sadly, the concert itself was a let-down.

Did I ever write about how one of my pet peeves at concerts is that they’re just too loud? Well, this one was too loud. And the venue Mark Knopfler plays at when he’s in town has some serious sound problems. Unless you’re sitting at a very narrow sweet spot, the sound will be horrible. The seats I had at that concert, some of the time all you could here was – and I’m serious about this – white noise.

Not music, not even painfully loud music, just the SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFFFFFFFF of white noise. No recognisable musical note whatsoever.

I assumed that was accidental – nobody could want the sound to be that bad, right? So I went to see Mark Knopfler the next time he was in town and the same thing happened. That time I actually complained, which is how I found out about the sweet spot.

The last time I saw Mark Knopfler I got seats that I thought were near enough to the sweet spot… but they weren’t. Plus it was just… painfully loud.

(The whole loudness is a totally different topic, I suppose, but I will say that yes, people have suggested I take ear plugs to concerts. Which just boggles my mind. Why on EARTH would I go to a MUSIC CONCERT if I can’t HEAR THE MUSIC? I already know what Mark Knopfler looks like, I’m not there to LOOK at him. I’m there to hear him play the damn guitar. But anyway).

Last year when Mark Knofpler was once again touring and playing a local show, I didn’t bother trying to get tickets. I figure it’s just too much of a gamble.

The other night, K called me a “fanboy” just because I went to a craft store, got some iron-on letters and made a slogan-shirt which I wore to a Nellie McKay concert. I don’t really think that makes me a fanboy. I mean if I had no reason whatsoever to think that she’d see it, maybe. But there was a pretty good chance she would (she tends to stay around after the show to chat/sign autographs/pose for photos for my other blog). And really me doing something weird on the off-chance that it’ll entertain one single person isn’t really new. Heck, this isn’t even the first time I made a t-shirt for that purpose. The fact that it DID entertain Nellie McKay is definitely a plus. But that’s another point – she actually takes the time and makes the effort to interact with people, even weird people with silly action figures, so she deserves the extra effort (plus I learned how to iron-on patches. Ok, I learned that I’m bad at it).

Alright, I think that’s enough tangents for one night. Honestly I think I’m still a bit wired from the three cups of tea I had at Nellie’s concert (yes, that’s what heavy drinking at a concert is around here – tea.) To summarise: I love music and I’m ever so grateful and appreciative to the wonderful artists who make it. But seriously, I’m not going to stand outside in the rain or suffer through enough noise that it makes me want to pass out just so I can say I’ve been there.

Oh, also, if you guys could stop trying to sell $50 t-shirts at your concerts, that’d be cool. I happen to know for a fact that iron-on letters cost like $3.

Before I start, though, I have to mention that, yes, there are some advantages to buying music online. Being able to select [...]]]> Yup. I still buy CDs. I have several hundred of them, and I have no plans to stop anytime soon. Since this seems to be rare nowadays, I thought I’d explain why.

Before I start, though, I have to mention that, yes, there are some advantages to buying music online. Being able to select tracks, for one. Albums might end up cheaper. You can always download album art and lyrics (plus album art really hasn’t been the same since we moved away from vinyl).

Stealing Doesn’t Count

Figured I’d put this one right up at the beginning. Yes, we all know you can download whatever you want online, but contrary to popular belief, that’s still wrong.

Now I’m not morally opposed to a… shall we say, try-before-you-buy kind of experience. Download some music, but if you like it, you really should buy it.

It’s A Physical Object

I can hold a CD. I can pick it up, move it around, put it on a shelf, or put it in a box in the attic. Which is what I actually do. The music gets copied to the computer, then the CDs get put in a box in the attic. More on why that makes sense later.

DRM

Yeah, you can buy DRM-free music online, but it’s still not ubiquitous.

Freedom

Say you buy a track in iTunes. It’s not really super easy to ditch iTunes and go somewhere else. Yes, there are other online music stores, but lets face it, iTunes is pretty much the top dog.

When I buy music, I want to be able to listen to it in my living room, in my car, in the gym, while walking the dog, while kayaking, wherever. I want it on the CD, on CD-Rs, on my media center computer, on my MP3 player, on a USB thumbdrive, on my cellphone, etc. I want to be able to copy and move my music around to wherever I want. I don’t want any restrictions.

Lossy vs Loseless

I mentioned earlier that I copy all the music from my CDs to the computer. Lossy compression is the reason that makes sense. It’s also the most nerdy.

Raw data on a CD takes up a large amount of disk space. An MP3 file (or a WMV file, or an AAC file, or an OGG file) is a compressed version of this file, and so it takes much less space (on the order of a 90% less space). The compression scheme these files use is what is called “Lossy” compression – which means that the content actually CHANGES. If you uncompress an MP3, you don’t get the original track. You lose some data, and therefore quality.

Compare this with loseless compression, like you’d get with a ZIP file. When you uncompress a ZIP file, you get the exact same file (or files) back.

There are loseless compression formats available for music. FLAC is the most popular one nowadays. The data in a FLAC file is exactly identical to the original music track. The downside is that these files are much larger than an MP3 file (about 50% smaller than the original track rather than 90% smaller).

The value in this is that, with loseless compression, you have a 100% complete copy of your CD. You can always uncompress it and burn it back to a disc with no data or quality loss.

Data formats tend to change over time. MP3 may be ruling the roost today, but there are other, superior formats. Perhaps some day we’ll want all our music files in a different format, for whatever reason. You can uncompress your MP3 files and recompress them in the new format, but doing so definitely results in data loss. Not so with loseless algorithms like FLAC – you can recompress your music into whatever format you like, as many times as you like, with no data loss at all.

I’ve seen albums for sale in FLAC format online, but the prices have been exactly the same as a CD!

SACD

I’m only half-serious about this one, but there are other music formats available on CDs, or CD-like media. SACD and DVD-A both provide much higher sound quality, and (optionally) full 5.1-channel surround sound, as opposed to CDs plain-old-2-channel stereo.

I’ll have to write more about those some other time.