One of the music blogs I frequent, Stereogum, has mini-album covers in his sidebar which link back to Amazon so people can read about and (more importantly) buy the music (because if you possess it, but didn't give the artist any monies for it, then you're going to hell...)

I digress. My point is I want to do that cool little thing. There are lots things I want to do with this, but I need to dedicate some time to learning and doing this stuff. I'm bad at time management as it is, and I'm a habitual procrastinator. I have no idea why, I continually find that once I get in and do something, it wasn't hard, took very little time and I feel better for having gotten it out of the way. For some reason I can't make it a pattern of behavior.

Additional thoughts on downloading music:

One thing I don’t think record companies either understand or, more importantly, believe really happens is that people use the internet to discover and/or preview music before they buy it. Some retailers have it where you can queue up a CD and listen on headphones, but I hate doing that. I don’t have the patience to stand there and wait for the music to impress me or not. In fact, when exposed to new music, it will sometimes take me months to warm up to it, and once I do I go crazy buying anything and everything they've ever done.

And Amazon allows you to preview snippets of each song. The problem? They continually pick the most uninteresting part of the song to sample. I’ve tested this on songs I know. They pick out the most inane part to sample. If I were to use this system, I probably wouldn’t own most of the music I love.

For instance – my new fave band The Dresden Dolls. Between their own web site, various blogs and other music sites, I had pretty much downloaded half their album. I loved the music – manic and over-the-top.

So I went over to Barnes and Noble with my monies and bought the CD. If I tried harder, I’m certain that I could have download the whole album. But I’m not into taking their art and giving them nothing in return. They need my monies. The CD packaging is crazy sexy cool and beats anything a top-selling artist puts out. That sh*t ain’t cheap. They're producing videos using volunteers because they (and their small record label) don’t have the resources to go out and hire anybody.

So you see...my conscience won’t let me have all this love without giving them 14 monies. My conscience is also prodding me to order a T-shirt off their site so I look “cool” at the Coachella music festival.