As we all know, men and women view the world differently. For today’s example, I’ve noticed that when I tell people I have somewhere around 5,000 legal CDs and 2,000 legal DVDs, men will generally say, “Wow! Cool! I gotta hang at your place!” On the other hand, women who hear this tend to look at me with a mixture of disbelief and pity, as if I was some (older but better looking) version of Steve Carell in The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Okay, on whatever level of rationality that still exists within me, I do understand that I spend more money on music and movies than any so-called ‘normal’ person. My friends all own their flats while I’ve got the Library of Congress lurking in my second (rented) bedroom.

The odd thing is, despite spending the equivalent of the gross national product of Berserkistan on their product, I’m the kind of person that the big record companies hate. Because I also download a lot of stuff from the internet. Actually I download massive quantities of stuff.

I do it for several reasons. I want to hear everything that’s out there, or as close to everything as possible. The radio stations don’t play it, most of the record shops don’t have listening stations and there’s no local equivalent of the iTunes store. (PCCW’s MOOV? It is to laugh.) But the thing is, when I hear something that I like and that I know I’m going to keep on playing, I go out to the shop and buy it – even though theoretically it’s something that I already ‘own’.

Now, some of you might say that I’m trying to rationalize bad (or even, gasp! criminal) behaviour. But I have my own wacky sense of fair play that says that I should give money to the people who create stuff that I actually like. And that I shouldn’t have to pay money for something that I don’t like.

Oddly enough, I’m not alone in feeling this way. Multiple surveys in countries around the world all yield the same results – the people who ‘illegally’ download the most stuff from the internet are also the people who spend the most money on legal music purchases. This also means that in countries around the world, the music industry has put itself in the position where they are suing their best customers. The way I see it, they are penalizing us for their own failure to anticipate the impact of technology on the marketplace and come up with a reasonable business plan that accounts for things like, oh, the 21st century.

This is all wonderfully illustrated in an interview that Wired magazine ran in November with Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris. Morris, a longtime record exec who undoubtedly loves music, says things in this interview like “(the record industry) just didn’t know what to do” and that they didn’t bother to hire experts to advise them because “we didn’t know who to hire”.

And in the wonderful logic of the business world, people like Doug Morris get to keep their jobs and their multi-million dollar salaries while making people like Jammie Thomas (a single mother found guilty of sharing 24 songs and fined US$222,000) pay the price for their incompetence.

I get so angry over this because it is something that violates my aforementioned personal sense of fair play. As does the fact that record companies insist on selling music online bogged down with Digital Rights Management ‘protection’ that does more harm than good, despite the fact that for more than 20 years they’ve been selling and are continuing to sell digital music with no copy protection at all (it’s called the compact disc, folks). It defies rational analysis. And so I believe the only sane response is an insane one.
But I digress.

I dislike doing year end Top 10 lists for a variety of reasons, so what I want to do here is to simply mention some albums that I downloaded, listened to and then went out and purchased, because I thought they were that good. Here, in no particular order, are some of them:

Nick Lowe – At My Age. I have listed this one first because to me it is the classic illustration of what I wrote above. I don’t think I have bought a Nick Lowe album in 20 years. If I didn’t have the chance to hear this first, I would never have bought it. But I downloaded it, played it non-stop for two days, and then bought it on my next visit to a CD store. It may well be the strongest album of his 35-year career but if I waited to hear it via traditional or legal methods, I would have missed it.

Arcade Fire – Neon Bible. I appreciated their first album on an intellectual level but I never thought of it as music for pleasure. This one features a more mainstream sound combined with more topical lyrics and it hit me right in the gut. I was blasting this one in the car for weeks.

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raising Sand. On first listen, this was so completely different from my expectations that I had no idea how to react to it. Finding out that T-Bone Burnett was the producer was the key because his fingerprints are all over it and repeated listens continue to yield deeper results. This may be the best duet album of its kind since Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris teamed up for Grievous Angel.

Bettye LaVette – Scene of the Crime. No one seems to make records like this anymore and we are far poorer for that. One of the best (and most consistently under-rated) soul voices of the past 25 years teamed up with some Muscle Shoals veterans and members of the Drive-By Truckers.

Bruce Springsteen – Magic. Okay, I am a Springsteen fanatic. My admiration for him exceeds all rational boundaries. Even so, I think this is his strongest album in years.

Tom Waits – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards. Waits is
one of those artists who can do no wrong with the critics. But I’ll confess that I liked him more in the ’70s and ’80s when he was a bit more conventional. This three-disc collection of outtakes and cast-offs paradoxically features some of his most mainstream music
in years.

Miles Davis – The Complete On the Corner Sessions. Go back to issue 245 to read about my admiration for this. And I love it even more a month later.

Radiohead – In Rainbows. Even though some are now saying that their groundbreaking internet ‘pay what you want’ distribution arrangement was nothing more than an innovative marketing device for the upcoming more traditional release, no one can deny that this is their most accessible music in years.

Well, I’m running out of space. But let me also give props to Bob Dylan, Robert Wyatt, Kings of Leon, Neil Young, Rilo Kiley, PJ Harvey, Annie Lennox, Candie Payne, Herbie Hancock, The National, Spoon, M.I.A., Roisin Murphy, Sigur Ros, LCD Soundsystem, Wilco, The Good The Bad & The Queen, Amy Winehouse and the soundtrack to the film I’m Not There.

Of course every list of this type is subjective to a large degree. But one truth remains – in a year in which the best sellers were Daughtry and Fergie, there was actually some good music out there waiting to be discovered. And it’s a damned shame that the very people who distribute this stuff – the record companies – seem content to make it so much harder to find.