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What the suits at the RIAA fail to understand, much like their movie
brethren who tried to strangle home video in the days of the Betamax,
is that electronic distribution is both a positive development and an
inevitable one. Positive because it means more ways of sampling more
kinds of music, the very product they're paid to evangelize.
A very small case in point is the album I mention here, a ten year old
collection of standards sung very well by a women I'd never heard of.
And if she hadn't caught my attention in ten years of standard record
company promotion, odds aren't all that great of my noticing her now.
Except... one night I was watching television and heard an
old favorite called
Will
You Love Me Tomorrow. So I did what I do when a song grabs
my attention: I went to the Internet. To one of those file sharing
programs that make record execs want to scream and throw things.
Where I found the original by The Shirelles and covers by Carole King,
Roberta Flack and a bunch of others. Including, as I'm sure you've
already figured out, some woman named Laura Fygi. So I downloaded a
copy of Ms. Fygi's version. And liked it a lot. And that took me to
the iTMS to see if they had any of her work. Which got me to this
album, where I discovered a wonderful version of
I
Only Have Eyes For You, a song from the 30s that has been
covered by everybody from
Billie
Holiday to
Art
Garfunkel. And moments later I was downloading and enjoying Laura
Fygi's interpretations of these songs and a dozen others.
Gosh, do you think maybe Steve Jobs was right, that you give people
a convenient way to buy music and they won't automatically
try to steal it? Could the suits be wrong?
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