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I love it when bands push musical distribution boundaries with new ways of delivering free or cheap content to me.  We are in a recession and entertainment dollars are the first to be cut.  We saw some cutting edge deliveries of free music from Radio Head and NIN last year.  Pay what you want schemes, that I think worked out well for the bands.  I went and paid for the Radio Head album, and got my $5 worth.  I really hope more bands cut out the middle man and deliver me cheap good music continuously.  I don’t mind paying for content when it’s quality.

Well today on my twitter stream I saw an article about being able to buy the entire PUSA discography for $3.  I was intrigued, so I checked it out.  Most of my day is spent in the iTunes store and iPhone applications due to my job, so I am always checking out new stuff and this peaked my interest.  PUSA released their entire discography through an application that you download.  So I plunked down my $2.99 and downloaded the app.  I figured there would be at least one catch, that you had to use the app to listen to the songs, instead of your music app on your iPhone or iTouch.  But there are two more catches, that keep from completely loving this idea.  First is that you MUST have an internet connection of some kind.  Me having an iPod Touch only means I have to have wifi connected, and that means on my flight today I will not be able to listen to the music.  Second is that you cannot select specific songs, only albums and it will randomly shuffle through the songs.  These two issues keep me from completely falling in love with this idea.  But kudos to you PUSA for trying something different to get me to listen to your music.  Maybe i’ll go and pay that $0.99 for “Peaches”, so I can have that flashback feeling to 1995 where I was awkward and nerdy.   (maybe i still am… lol ).

If you don’t mind the two restrictions I mentioned, then go and spend your $3. The music quality is fantastic and now I get a full preview of their new album for the price of two coffees.

I made a declaration earlier this year to discover bands that I didn’t know existed in 2008.  I also blogged about switching my radio to CBC radio 2 and this has helped my endeavor.  Well I feel that I have added 1 band to my list.  They are called the Great Lake Swimmers, and are a Canadian band that I describe as a mix between Simon and Garfunkel and Gary Jules’ Mad World.  My musical tastes generally don’t land in that zone between melodic piano pop and folk, but this song resonated with me for some reason.

Spend some time and expand your musical tastes, you will be enriched.