Music To My Ears

Within my lifetime, what music I have been able to listen to, listen to easily,  has dramatically increased. From records and tapes to CDs and digital. From radio to MTV to videos at your fingertips. From stereos and boom boxes to Walkmans to iPods to music on your phone to Bluetooth.

Debate continues to rage within the music industry over who makes what money now. (Here's a good book about the music industry by David Byrne of the Talking Heads.)

Thanks to my music-geek husband, we listen to a premium streaming service. (We use Google Music: $10 a month and, in addition to listening to the service’s “radio stations,” you can call up pretty much whatever artist, album, song you want whenever you want.)

What we're exposed to has grown dramatically. For instance, my son heard a song, playing through a Google radio station in my car on the way to school, from a group called  Devil Makes Three:

Link: http://youtu.be/yvcggBLbTk0

Now, we listen to them all the time and my son bought an album of theirs through iTunes.

While I was at the gym, songs kept coming on that I really liked. It took me a little while to realize they were all the same guy, Dan Auerbach:

Link: http://youtu.be/9o4l10CtN7g

He's also one of The Black Keys:

 

Link: http://youtu.be/6yCIDkFI7ew

New music doesn’t reach us only through streaming. My husband read a profile of Tinariwen, a group from northern Mali, in The New Yorker:

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uMUuuW13Fp8

So cool.

We’ve bought their albums, as CDs, on iTunes, and we listen to them on Google Music. And follow them on Facebook.

Not looking to cheat anybody, but this is a great time to listen to music.