When it Comes to "Imported" Music, Buy Direct

Bonobo's "Days to Come" album: iTunes Canada: CDN $17.82. Direct from Ninja Tune: £4. D'uh!

I know, I know, buying from the iTunes Music Store is easy, convenient and so on… But it can be quite a rip off at times too.

Take Bonobo’s Days to Come album for example. I was about to buy it on the Canadian iTMS when I saw the price: CDN $17.82. I thought to myself: betcha Ninja Tune will have this for sale. And wouldn’t you know, they sure do.

Not only was the album much cheaper (£4 ☛ CDN $6.50) but it also came as 320kbps MP3s instead of 128kbps AACs and included 7 instrumental tracks to boot.

There you have it. Sometimes, it pays to run a Google search before one-click-buying music off of iTunes.

Three Songs I Never Get Sick of

One of my roles at Automattic is to maintain Plinky, now that we’ve acquired the service from Thing Labs. I’m a techy on this project, so I still find myself being exited about the prompts our editors come up with. Here’s me trying to answer one of them: “Name three songs you never get sick of“.

Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers

This song struck a particular chord in me when I listened to it the first time. I was seventeen years old and had just moved from Martinique (Caribbean) to Montreal (Canada), only starting to truly learn spoken day-to-day English. This is the first English song I truly understood from start to finish and could relate to at the same time.

Midnight In A Perfect World by DJ Shadow

The combination of the powerful drum beats, deep background vocals and soothing female voice never fails to give me goose bumps. Every time.

Is This Love by Bob Marley

Despite living a rather typical modern North-American existence, full of affluence and superficiality, this song still embodies some of the core values I cherish in life: the importance of love and family above all.

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My Kids are my New Music Discovery Engine

The time had to come eventually. My kids are now one of my most effective means of discovering new music, which is absolutely awesome as far as I’m concerned. It’s about time actually!

Saving the occasional Bieber-slips (…), they have pretty good and eclectic tastes, ranging from electronica to alternative, old classics to experimental. This makes me quite proud since I perceive enjoying a wide range of musical genres as a good path to a multicultural vision of the World.

The last two albums they introduced me to were:

Never fear, I still have a few tricks up my sleeve and being an avid music listener myself, I’m sure to enlighten their repertoire with other musical treasures of my own for a long time to come.

But it sure feels great to now have a reciprocal relationship with them on the music front! :D