| CD clubs not seedy clubs
By Pat Healy Burn, Baby, Burn When most people think of CD clubs, they think of those Sunday paper supplements with the little stamps of album cover art, advertising twelve CDs for a penny. But today, CD club has come to mean a network of music lovers burning mixed discs for each other. They’re mostly informal groups, and if you can’t find one by poking around on the Internet, they’re easy to start. Just get a group of people together, make a mixed CD, and burn a bunch of copies for everyone in the group. Everyone else in the group does the same, and you’re that many mixes richer. The more diverse the group is, the more diverse your CDs will be. This summer I joined the HangOntoYourEgo Mixtape Club, which was started by a friend of a friend. My one degree of removal from this group of people ensured that I didn’t end up with CDs full of songs I had heard countless times before in friends’ dorm rooms. I received an e-mail invitation to join HOYE in late June, when Ian Fitzpatrick, the aforementioned friend of a friend, sent out a group e-mail to about 80 people. “The club is good, cheap summer fun for almost-free,” he wrote in the invite. “It’s totally free if your office has a postage machine and blank CDRs.” Ian, a multimedia director at a Boston advertising agency, had been trading mixed CDs with friends for years, and had also been participating in online activities such as Friendster. He decided to combine the two. “Although people are connecting, nothing really comes out of the online thing, and I thought this would be a cool way to have new music,” he says. “I’m not saving the world here, nobody is, but the idea of people communicating this way is just a more organic way to do things.” I’m Burnin’ For You Unlike file sharing on the Internet, receiving a home-made mix is personal, in that it allows you to hear 80 minutes of sound that somebody personally selected to put on disc, rather than just combing through that person’s entire online database, looking for patterns in preference. It’s also more tangible, in that at the end of the run, you have a bunch of discs you didn’t have before. My first CD arrived in the beginning of July, and it was from Ian. It appeared that he had put quite a bit of work into it. The image on the jacket was a full-color enlargement of a fingerprint, with a window displaying a close-up of sliced scallions, printed on contact paper. The song list looked eye-rollingly pretentious, kicking off with a band called Red Guitars, moving through some guy named William DeVaughn and ending up with someone I imagined was some sort of hip-hop guy called Kid Acne. I had never heard of any of these artists either, and I’m a bona fide music nerd. But all pretentiousness melted when I played the CD. The disc transformed itself from one full of bands I didn’t know to a disc full of bands that I wanted to know everything about. The kickoff song “Good Technology,” by Red Guitars sounded like one of those new bands that play 80s-style music, which usually bothers me, but the song was good enough to make it acceptable. As the disc progressed each track revealed itself like a bonus prize in a video game. I wanted to listen to all of the songs in their entirety, but I also wanted to hear what was next, like it might disappear if I didn’t skip ahead. I was on my computer by the third listen, figuring out who the hell Red Guitars and William DeVaughn were. It turns out that Red Guitars were not playing 80s music because they are part of a new scene, they were playing 80s music because that’s when they made music. Who knew? Not me. Other CDs started arriving in the mail over the next few weeks. After Ian set such a high bar, not all of the other discs reached such heights, but each disc had at least a few redeeming songs, and a lot of them featured bands that I had heard of, but not actually heard. The transformation from heard of to heard is like the transformation of student to teacher. Having actually heard, you can now go forth and spread the good word about great bands. I went to Newbury Comics to look for a CD by a band called The Hold Steady that was a highlight on one mix, and I even bought a CD version of Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque, a cassette I had lost ages ago, because of the inclusion of “Alcoholiday,” on another mix. Burn to be Wild When it came time to burn my own mix, my ideas were boiling over. When Ian set up the club, he stressed a loose deadline of mid-August, so I needed to get to work. What could I put on there to excite people about music that they didn’t already know? I opted to go the route of combining local and famous artists, which when done properly can work the by-association magic of making the locals seem famous and the famous seem local. Bands like Cars Can Be Blue can sound as likely to be on Merge Records as their CD mix neighbor Neutral Milk Hotel, and when The Ticks are next to The Beatles, they sound almost like they could be sharing a bill next week at The Paradise Lounge. Sprinkled within my mix were also a few music geek montages, which included an introduction to the mix with song excerpts such as the Blue Oyster Cult song which already provided a heading for this article, and a medley of The Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” with Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” made to seem as if they were opponents in a debate. I have yet to receive any feedback on my mix, but the experience of putting it together was enough fun in itself, knowing it was almost definite that ten other music geeks would listen to some of my favorite songs at least once. Burnin’ and Lootin’ As far as copyright issues are concerned, CD clubs are not exactly legal, but Ian’s philosophy is that he’s under the radar enough to not be noticed by musicians rights pilgrims like Metallica. “The worst thing that’s happening is that people who love music are sharing their interests,” he says. “This is really how music publicity should work.” Halfway through the HOYE experience, some members received an e-mail from Ian saying that one of the members had dropped out because “her roommate would prefer not to have ‘copyright-protected’ information sent to their home, thus opening them up to ‘potential litigation.’” Ian laughs at this situation, saying how he used to work with the member’s roommate, a person who would frequently pirate software without thinking twice. Burning Desire The first leg of HOYE has gone so well that Ian’s planning on continuing the tradition every other season, but don’t wait until winter to join this club, his advice is to start your own. “If you get too big you lose some of the intimacy,” he says. “I’d like to keep this like a club more than the far reaching arms of the Internet. We’ve already got like 200 people on the waiting list.” Ian says the most important aspect of starting a CD club is not the exclusive nature, but the inclusive aspects of the sharing process. “I might only know about 10 percent of what’s new out there,” he says, “but my 10 percent is going to be different from somebody else’s.” Back |
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