It's the early 2000s. I wait until my parents go to bed and sneak downstairs to watch some late-night MTV. Every once in a while I discover a band or record I dig and want to know more about. I have school the next morning, so I won't actually get to look them up online until I get home in the afternoon. If I want to catch the music video again, I'll have to turn on MTV again and hope it airs, or maybe get lucky and the Yahoo! Music website will have it, and I'll watch the first 15 seconds before the stream starts buffering interminably. No instant gratification here.
Some bands have websites, but they're often Flash-based and take forever to load on my dial-up connection. There's Allmusic.com and of course the venerable Pierre Scaruffi site, but they're better for reviews of classic records than newer ones. I know about Pitchfork.com but the reviews feel inorganic, too much like high-falutin' culture criticism than just telling me what the record sounds like.
So where does one go for the everyman's perspective? Amazon.com! While I preferred getting my CDs from the Ebay-owned Half.com (used CDs for $5 all-in with Media Mail shipping), it was a pure ecommerce site with no user feedback other than seller ratings. Same with CDBaby. Amazon was one of the few online outposts for buying something and talking about it. I still bought CDs because downloading music on dial-up was painful and prone to abrupt terminations, chances of which were multiplied several-fold the less mainstream it was. So I spent many an afternoon reading reviews, sometimes hundreds of them, just to make a purchasing decision.
Kinda wonder what this guy was up to the rest of the day...
I wrote this one :)
