$26.99.

It took me about two seconds to make the decision: no way in hell am I buying the new Kristin Hersh CD for $26.99 at HMV. Not that I was all that keen about buying from HMV in the first place; support your local independent record store and all that, but it would’ve taken an extra subway token to get to one and the Arcade Fire album was really cheap—priced to sell at $13.99. But $26.99? How on earth does a non-import, non-special-edition CD cost that much, even in Canadian dollars?

I should’ve double-checked the CD imprint to see if it said 4AD, but at the time I just assumed Learn to Sing Like a Star was a 4AD release like all of Hersh’s previous albums. But it turns out that’s not the case: while 4AD handles distribution for rest-of-world, Hersh has turned to another label, Yep Roc, to handle U.S. distribution and promotion. Which causes a problem: who has the rights for Canada? And here’s where the $26.99 comes in: if 4AD doesn’t have American rights, they may simply treat the entire North American market as hands-off, even though they technically have Canadian distribution rights. Which may mean 4AD’s selling the CDs as though they were imports, since everything’s being handled from the home offices in Britain. This would also explain why Amazon.ca’s selling the CD at a still-princely $21.99.

Kristin Hersh’s U.S. label, Yep Roc, has an online store, which is great. They also give you MP3s of the album for free when you buy the CD, which is just about the best feature I’ve ever seen from an online music store—more stores need to do this! Unfortunately, shipping to Canada from Yep Roc is $6.95. Which gives me a total around $23 USD, or—yep, you guessed it—$27 CAD.

For most artists this would be the end of the road. Luckily, Hersh has been doing the web thing long enough to have a great site and an online store of her own, with far more reasonable postage rates and even a slightly lower list price to boot. So even though I don’t get to enjoy the album now via MP3, I now have a CD winging its way to me from throwingmusic. So what should you take away from this whole experience? Always buy from the artist whenever possible.

Update: Less than a week later, my CDs arrive. Yes, CDs—they popped a bonus 3-track disc in the envelope as well. Three more tracks of Kristin Hersh and nine bucks cheaper—take that, HMV!

Minor change to the blog: now MP3 files have more readable file names. I finally got around to fixing how I’ve been handling MP3s in Wordpress through the templates and in the admin interface. Goodbye, lots-of-words-seperated-by-dashes.mp3 filenames, and welcome back Artist – Song.mp3 filenames!

(Oh, and I upgraded Wordpress from v1.5.2 to v2.1.1 and removed the custom admin code in favour of a shiny new custom plugin. But you won’t notice any of that unless I brag about it in a not-so-parenthetical comment.)

So here we are again, the end of another year. I think I went through far more albums this year than last, a reminder perhaps that I should maybe not try to review every single album that passes my desk. Anyways, hope you enjoyed the commentary. There’ll be some holiday tracks to wrap up the year, and all the Review 2006 mp3s will be up for another three weeks, for anyone who needs to play catch-up. See you in the new year!

[the best of the year]
Dears – Gang Of Losers
Be Your Own Pet – Be Your Own Pet
Pipettes – We Are The Pipettes
Essex Green – Cannibal Sea
Blow – Paper Television
Rose Melberg – Cast Away The Clouds
Sonic Youth – Rather Ripped
Laura Barrett – Earth Sciences

[the honourable mentions]
Erase Errata – Nightlife
Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
Yo La Tengo – I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
Viva Voce – Get Yr Blood Sucked Out
Miho Hatori – Ecdysis

[the odds and ends]
Beth Orton – Comfort of Strangers
Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins – Rabbit Fur Coat
Fiery Furnaces – Bitter Tea
Magneta Lane – Dancing With Daggers
Dear Nora – There Is No Home

[the disappointments]
Built To Spill – You In Reverse
Rainer Maria – Catastrophe Brings Us Together
Pretty Girls Make Graves – Elan Vital
Cat Power – The Greatest

I finally tracked down the domestic release of Goldfrapp’s Supernature. Yep, it has the Content Protected logo in the spine as well. Don’t buy, download!

The import versions might be okay; I don’t remember seeing the copy protection logo on the ones I saw a couple of months back. Also, an update on the Beth Orton CD: I double-checked, and both the limited edition version and the normal version have Content Protected logos on them. Maybe it’s a Canada thing. In any case, it’s definitely a “don’t support this practice and steal this music” kind of thing.

I hope that in the future, Canadian Music Week or NXNE adopts this wonderful idea: SXSW 2006 has put up torrents with MP3s of every band playing the festival. There are also trailers for the film portion of the festival, if you’re also a cinephile. As much as I enjoy paging through the alt.weeklies in advance of NXNE, I never actually go to the shows because I’m never convinced enough by anything the reviewers say to show up and take a chance (having to find a place to crash or take a long taxi home to Thornhill doesn’t help, either). But listening to all the bands before you plan your itinerary? Genius!

Went out to grab some CDs today, and came back with the new Jenny Lewis and Cat Power records. Those should be fun to listen to. I also hope to enjoy the new Beth Orton album, and I picked it up in the store today. And then put it right back down. I’m not buying it.

Someone had the infinite wisdom to make Orton’s Comfort Of Strangers a copy-protected disc. Whether it will launch a crappy proprietary player on my computer, install a malicious rootkit or just give me MP3s full of static when I try to rip it, I don’t know. In fact, I’ll never know because I’m never buying another copy-protected disc again after the whole Broken Social Scene fiasco. And to think, I was starting to really like Beth Orton again. I know she doesn’t appreciate people downloading her work, but that’s no reason to punish the people who actually want to buy her music. The fact that Comfort Of Strangers was floating around the internet long before the album’s street date yesterday shows that anyone who’s determined to listen to the album without paying for it will be easily accomodated regardless of whatever hoops you make legitimate customers jump through. And in case you think copy protection is a necessary evil, think again.

I highly encourage you to download a copy of Orton’s album if you’re interested in listening to it. Do not, under any circumstances, purchase any copy of her album that displays the Copy Controlled logo and warning.

Another year, another $365. (Don’t I wish.) So that was 2005: occasionally brilliant, but otherwise a bit of an underachiever. Compared to last year, it was a lot harder to pick albums I genuinely, wholeheartedly liked. In fact, if you put the 2004 and 2005 lists together, I think most of the top ten would be dominated by 2004 releases. I know what you’re going to tell me, though: “hey, I didn’t see Clap Your Hands Say Yeah / Sufjan Stevens / Antony and the Johnsons / Franz Ferdinand / etc. on your list!” Perhaps one day I’ll get around to listening to all of those albums (except Clap Your Hands Say Yeah; yes, there is a singer more annoying than the love child of Raine Maida and Billy Corgan, and guess what band he fronts!). But probably not.

[the best of the year]
Handsomeboy Technique – Adelie Land
Saint Etienne – Tales from Turnpike House
Mary Timony – Ex-Hex
50 Foot Wave – Golden Ocean
Broadcast – Tender Buttons
Joel Plaskett – La De Da
Petra Haden – Sings The Who Sell Out
Bullette – The Secrets
Ivy – In The Clear

[the honourable mentions]
Dressy Bessy – Electrified
Dirty Three – Cinder
Sleater-Kinney – The Woods
Goldfrapp – Supernature
Thievery Corporation – The Cosmic Game
Broken Social Scene – Broken Social Scene

[the disappointments]
Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine
Gemma Hayes – The Roads Don’t Love You
Need New Body – Where’s Black Ben?
Ladytron – The Witching Hour
Caribou – The Milk Of Human Kindness

After a bunch of tweaks to the RSS files (with a little help from Feedburner), I’ve managed to make the RSS feeds podcast-compatible. Since I’ve never actually played or streamed a podcast before (especially not through iTunes, which apparently has extra functions my RSS feed supports), I won’t know if any of this works or not, so you’ll have to let me know. Hopefully this will make things easier for the sizable portion of the audience that reads this through a feedreader. (But you’re missing out on my pretty design! I splattered fake paint around for DAYS for you!)

edited to add: Only after I do all that hard work do I realize that if you head over to my feed on the Hype Machine, not only can you get a podcast feed, but you can listen to (though not apparently download) MP3s that have already been taken off this site. That’s right—they archive this site back to the beginning of July. So if anyone’s looking for any files that have gone offline since then, head over to the Hype Machine.

The new site’s up. Go nuts. Among the new features:

• Comments!
• You can sort by category now. Those icons? Now they mean something. (And they’re prettier to boot.) There’s also a category for last year’s year in review. Yeah, there’ll be one for this year’s as well…
• Looking for a particular entry? There’s now a search box at the bottom of every page.
• And more lovely bits and pieces.

All this courtesy of WordPress and some monkey grease. Let me know if anything’s amiss.

Something else to note: seems the server’s been slow and/or unreachable these past couple of days. I have no idea what’s going on, except that it seems like the database server isn’t doing so well. You may find service intermittent over the next couple of days. Keep your fingers crossed.

In lieu of a song, an explanation.

I built this site with my own two hands and the PHP online manual. And when I say that, I don’t just mean the frontend here—I mean the backend that allows me to make posts as well. You don’t see a Blogger logo or a link to Movable Type anywhere because this blog doesn’t run on either of those systems, or any of the other weblog systems out there. This was partially so I could learn how to put a blogging system together, and partially because none of those services really has all the little features I wanted for an MP3 blog. And of course, there’s the sense of pride and ownership, though I can’t really brag about my homebrew blogging system to anyone. They’d look at me funny and go “huh?” if they didn’t go “why even bother?”

Well, the year-long experiment is over. I’m in the process of moving this whole site over to Wordpress, a blogging system built in PHP that’s far more robust and complete than my junkheap setup. This means a couple of things, like comments and a more flexible category system (you know those icons to the side? yeah, you’ll be able to sort by music style, hopefully). It also means there’s going to be a bit of a mess while I get it all together, and no posts until it’s done.

Don’t worry, that’ll only be a couple of days at most. Hopefully this will be the only missed post in the unofficial post-every-three-days schedule. Until then, I invite you to take a look at the small linklist to the left (which will also be getting bigger once Wordpress is in). If none of the above paragraphs made any sense to you, here’s the gist: I’ll be back shortly.