Wednesday, September 3, 2008

What Is This?

During 8 years of living in San Francisco, I was obsessed with the bargain bins at Amoeba Music. Once every couple weeks, I would spend an hour or two combing through them. These bins (talking specifically about the SF one, although the Berkeley and LA ones aren't too shabby) have shitload of CDs priced from $1-5. For every three you buy, you get the lowest-priced one for free. So...if you're willing to spend a couple hours getting your hands filthy flipping through dirty, dusty cases and jacking up your back squatting to pick through bins close to the ground, you can walk away with some good stuff at a very cheap price.

With so many people either buying music through downloads and using the internet to find things for free, I've started wondering if stores like Amoeba will eventually go the way of the dinosaur. On a trip back to SF this past weekend, the store didn't seem to be in any trouble. The place was packed and everyone was headed to the registers with armloads of CDs, records, DVDs, etc. I guess plenty of us still enjoy collecting stuff.

I spent my usual 2 hours digging for buried treasure and came up with 8 CDs that ended up costing me a grand total of $13 and change. You can't beat that. Unfortunately, one of my current goals is to get rid of things and live a simpler, clutter-free life. It's hard to do that when you add 8 CDs to almost full racks holding several hundred (many of which I haven't given a full listen).

That brings me to the purpose of this blog. I figure I need some kind of structure in place to get me to plow through all these CDs and then move them along via Lala, eBay, or a local record store. So why not do a music blog with a half-assed descriptions and a sample mp3? I can get shit done and maybe one or two people will get turned on to something they like.

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