The weird thing is, is that ilearned a hell of alot while I did download MP3s:
For instance, when I first got into elctronica I did not know many artist/song title names.
So I read the back of my CDs and serached for them on Napster/Kazaa.
BOOM!
CROSS-REFERENCING : A huge hitlist shows up of the songs you were looking for, as well as stuf that you didn't know was produced by the same artist, as well as some stuff they migh have collaborated with others on.
Then I searched ont he new artist names that I learned of on the initial search.
Also I found out about BBC's Essential Mix. I downloaded a few of them and was blown away by the cools sets that were being broadcast. I relentlessly searched the net for a place where I could buy the whole Esential Mix archive but to no avail. Then I found
www.freshlymixed.com. They sell the entire 10 years (almost a few are missing) of Essential Mix, Kiss 100 Mixes, Breezeblock, and a few other odd series for $179 U.S. It came to me on 30 DVDS! I still have not even listend to half of them yet.
P2P networks were a great research tool; they just fucked a lot of artists out of the small amount of the royalties they would have received from their bigshot producers.
Now there is
www.mercora.com.
Mercora functions just like Kazaa with one major difference. You can place whatever you like in your shared folder, you can search other's folders and they can search yours, but NO ONE CAN DOWNLOAD FROM EACH OTHER, you can only PLAY the tracks through the P2P like on demand radio.
This seems kind of cool as long as they don't fuck it up with ad-ware like Kazaa was.
Now I am ripping all my old CDs. Out of about 350 I have ripped 50 so I have a few more months to go.
Then I have to patch it all together.
Ultimately I want to put all of my P2P MP3s, my ripped Cds, and the EM archive onto a massive RAID5 array and save it for posterity + make it all available to me when I want to hear it instead of looking through a bunch of DVD-Rs I have had to make to archive all this shit.
Those were good days, but it is a time whose golden era has passed.
-AlexHall74