Saturday, March 28, 2015

Becoming What You Hate


Some philosophers posit that you will always become that which you hate. Not sure how much I can argue with that statement.
By the time you read this we at the space cadet academy that is Astro Al will have gone digital or will shortly. Yes, sadly we will no longer be selling cds online. Our store page on www.astroal.com (yes, remember above all else that everything is a commercial for everything else) will be converted so that all we will sell musically are digital downloads. If you come to see us at a gig, we will still be selling cds but these will only be sold at our shows.
We live in a world of wonderful tactile experience. Touching, feeling, holding are a daily occurrence that should never be overrated. We live in a physical world and should embrace that yet we are rapidly coming to disdain most material concepts. We stream our movies, we download our music, we don’t cherish them, study the artwork on a cd cover, or look at the grooves on a vinyl album, and we don’t care about the feel of paper books in our hands. I can’t tell anyone how much time I’ve enjoyed staring at the magnificent artwork on some cds and vinyl albums and the exciting moment when I pick up the album or cd and hold it in anticipation of the joy that I will soon have when it’s played, that is something I will always savor.
So why did we cave into this trend of replacing the sensation of touch?
Money.
The recent postal increases and international taxes have put us out of the physical sales realm. We just can’t justify charging $10 for our cds and then charging people $10 to ship them. We kept our prices low. We always included shipping in our costs so basically we were selling our cds for about $5, while charging $10, total $5 of which went to shipping. We had no problem with that, it worked well for us and the people kind enough to want to pay for our music.
Sadly this is no more.
So here we are the thing we loathe.
Download away.

Yours in self-loathing,
Count Robot