This is my first music post of the new incarnation of this blog. It’s funny because the blog started as an exclusively music blog. Part of why things stopped with that was the blog’s niche disappeared. It was a time of illegal downloads, just before streaming sites took over. My goal was to to gather free music that people were putting out. It was mostly unsigned bands, covers, remixes and some swap your email address/ like a Facebook page/ retweet a link for a download jobbies. When it began, I had just seen Time is a Thief supporting Canterbury in the Academy in Dublin. I went home and looked up Time is a Thief and they had 2 free tracks on their social media. I downloaded them and listened to them a lot on my big iPod classic. From then, I saw them any time they played in Dublin. I went to see them support Billy Talent. I bought all the tshirts. To me, it seemed like that investment of posting 2 free tracks on social media paid off.

It was a weird time for music. Buying music was finished. CDs were still around but there wasn’t really any money in it. Money was from gigging and merch. I think we’re in another weird time for music right now. I had tickets for five gigs that have been cancelled or postponed due to the virus. For big bands there’s probably big losses, but these acts are in decent financial positions in the first place and also don’t take on a lot of the costs of gigging themselves or have insurance for these things. For smaller acts this has the potential to ruin people. There’s a whole load of ways that this will fuck up people’s lives. There’s self financed tours, refunding ticket sales, paying bands, techs and crews, transportation etc. But there’s also things like people who don’t renew their leases on their homes because they’re planning on being on tour for 3-6 months for example. Or getting merch made in bulk to sell on tour and then being stuck with a van load of tshirts and vinyl.

So my plan is to try and buy some merch. I was supposed to see Darwin Deez in May so I bought the 10 year anniversary re-release of his first album vinyl bundle. It’s a tshirt and a record that I like from an artist I care about. Things aren’t going to be back to normal for a long time and I care about the music that I listen to and the people that make it. This is how these people make a living and the financial model for how they do that has gone out the window so it’s important to support them in anyway that we can.

Here’s what I got: https://darwindeez.tmstor.es/cart/product.php?id=57613