This Internet Thing Is Here To Stay: Apple Third Largest Retailer of Music

By Nobodaddy on 07-11-2007

Are you experiencing rock-club restlessness, dance party dizziness, or hip-hop-related heartburn? Have you found lately that you are more pallid than Jack White, uncharacteristically apathetic about the redundant re-return of The Rentals, or unusually snippy toward that annoying friend of yours from work who seems to be the only person who legitimately listens to Fatboy Slim and Chemical Brothers?

If so, then you might be suffering from an increasingly common disease known as Prodigious Art-Folk Withdrawal Syndrome (PAWS), an alarming ailment that affects thousands of college-to-middle-aged music fans around the world. PAWS results when repeated abuse of tepid, overwrought, and predictably-linear pop structures leads to severe ear atrophy and unrelenting cravings for a more cerebral, syllabically-stimulating, folk-bent art music.

Luckily, there's a new hope on the metaphor-mixed horizon:

Introducing Newsom (antidoxylamine HCl).

Newsom is a safe, non-non-habit-forming chamber folk artist, made publicly available in Europe later this summer, that you simply listen to once a day (or as directed by a record store clerk) for fast, effective, and long-lasting relief of the kind of alterna-tedium caused by PAWS. Newsom works by targeting specific areas in the brain that show a high response to the harp and chamber ensemble stimuli found on last year's excellent Drag City LP Ys as well as this year's Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band EP. In a recent study, subjects who were exposed to the kind of three-dimensional, vivid-yet-obscure story songs found in Newsom increased their ability to concentrate on 12+ minute pieces of music by 45%.

Side affects of Newsom are generally mild and include a shrill, raspy singing voice, an inflamed writ, a secret crush on the stately siren, and, in extreme cases, an increased desire to speak in Middle English (if you experience a bout of Middle English lasting more than four hours, you should stop listening to Newsom and consult your therapist).

Say goodbye to PAWS and hello to the harp-playing Newsom: the "plucky" singer/songwriter!

Newsom is available at the following locations:

By The Friz on 07-11-2007

That Sound Exchange

Made an offer today

To try an’ make internet radio stations’ worries go away

But Save Net Radio still ain’t happy

No, no they ain’t happy at all

Just like

Both of them ain’t happy

And happiiiineeeeessssssssss

[The recorded portion of the tape slowly crawls to an unintelligible stop as our intrepid field reporter has once again failed to account for his TalkBoy’s brief but brilliant battery life with a fresh pack of Duracells... Garbled static cuts to the shortwave polka broadcasts previously recorded on the cassette.]

Notes: Play to the tune of Sweet Home Chicago, except substitute any reference to “California” with Sound Exchange’s proposed $2,500 cap on the minimum $500 per station/channel payments for any one online internet service, which, as part of the Copyright Royalty Board’s (CRB) ruling on the matter, is set to go into effect July 15. Swap any references to “Chicago” with Save Net Radio and DiMA’s polite decline of the “California” offer, describing the proposed offer’s discontinuance in 2008, two years before the CRB’s decision expires, as “a stay of execution for Internet radio.” And any meetings said to take place at “the crossroads” will most likely occur on Capitol Hill or some reasonably accommodating and mutually agreed upon hill that may or may not be a crossroads. Or perhaps even some metaphorical crossroads of internet tubes, organized in, of course, series.