Category Archives: music

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Spotify Premium: Like Scour in the 90s, But Legal

Who remembers Scour?

I have vivid memories of working at my college job, sitting at my desk in the office next to my co-worker, Jeff, and one of us getting a song stuck in our head. Off to Scour, to download and listen to something random, like the theme from the A-Team, or some esoteric 80s song, or some freedom rock (turn it up!).

Did I know it was shady? Sure. Did I care? Nope. It was available, and there wasn’t exactly another avenue for me to quench my immediate musical desires back in 1999, and it was before the days of packet-sniffers that would throttle bandwidth or flag me for peer-to-peer activity, so…

Fast forward 18 years to 2017.* When I get Billy Ocean stuck in my head, I pull up Spotify on my work laptop — I pay a subscription fee of about $10 a month for Premium — and search for “Caribbean Queen.” I get an entire compilation album of Billy Ocean’s greatest hits, and I listen to the sounds of elementary school for a good half hour. Unlike some 20 years ago, though, I don’t have to wait 15 minutes for a 3MB mp3 to download over the 10/100 BaseT ethernet connection.

And it’s completely legal.

*Side note: I still can’t get over being 40 years old and so vividly remembering multiple decades.

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Tonight’s Requested Dance Party Song

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For some reason, Connor calls this “The Clown Song.” He sang the intro riff well enough that I knew which song he meant, though. 🙂

Someday, when he’s older, I hope he feels about the Psychedelic Furs and the Pet Shop Boys and the Flaming Lips and Bowie and The Cure and Midnight Oil the way I do about my Mom’s favorite artists from the late 70’s and early 80’s.