Russian music downloads website [smh] at about 7 cents a song. After much discussion and reading [slashdot + more] it sounds like it's quite legal for Australians (due to our legalisation of parallel importing) to use the site. It's likely it's illegal for those in the US to use the site. It's unclear for the UK. Apparently the site has been around for months. They pay licensing fees to the Russian RIAA/APRA equiv. as if they were broadcasting the song on the radio, meaning the fee is about 1 cent.

The site sells songs by the Megabyte in the compression format of your choosing (including lossless compression formats).

But do they have the music I want. I will look tonight, assuming the site isn't dead.

Subject URL: Keep everything?

Mark Bernstein suggests it's cost effective to never delete anything.

From time to time, I tidy up my hard disk. I delete useless old files and excess Tinderbox notes. I weed out the worst snapshots, the redundant images and the blurred pictures and the pictures I accidentally took of someone's feet.

This is probably a mistake. It often costs more to decide to throw something away than to save it forever.

He goes on to argue that assuming we continue to get cheaper and more data on our harddisks it's easier to just keep everything and not waste time deciding what to delete.

I use this arguement with the (physical) stuff I collect... It's much easier to just leave it there and carry it with me everywhere I move than to decide what I want to keep. Every now and then I decide "I'm purging myself of Metallica stuff" and put a special effort in but overall, just let it rot.

That said, at the moment the arguement only holds for text, and possibly to images. I do a lot of audio and video experiementing. Old band demos, old band videos etc. I can't just keep everything. It's too much. I suppose one day I could.

I filter and delete so that I can find things later. If I kept everything, trying to find what I need would be impossible. It's a risk I don't mind taking to possibly delete something I may want in the past in order to find what I want now.

It's quite easy to lose something just because you havnt' labelled (or metatagged) it properly. We need tools that make it easy to label and tag our data when it's created. I tend to find the file system date stamp and long file names are usually enough...

I have all that room in my roof I could stuff with newspaper if I wanted...

A while ago I got interested in an article about Universal putting their CD catalog online to buy (in lossless compression format, mostly intended as a wholesaler to the Napsters and iTunes of the world). What I found interesting was that the article never mentioned how insanely cool it is that these days we can put 30+ years worth of a record companies catalog on a single farm of computers and build a simple interface to get and search for all of it and no-one blinks an eye.

It seems perfectly natural to me to think of a site that could have every single piece of music ever released ever on it, uncompressed, searchable and downloadable. Difficult and insanely expensive hardware wise but the technology is there.

That is so cool.

Another singing crazy on the train yesterday. Male this time. Same clipboard, same logo. I didn't hear what he was singing as I had my own headphones on (listening to Dream Theater live from somewhere in April this year). Similar reactions from the passengers, only less frightened. Similar look on the singers face ("at least I'm getting paid for this"). He got off at Burnley. The thing is... both of them had OK voices. Not great, not actual singing career or get on stage good but in tune. I wonder what an "act like a knob in public" gig like this pays.

At the moment I'm refusing to look up anything about it, because I'll be playing into their advertising hands. I've already thought about it too much. If it happens again though I might just write an official complaint to Connex. That might be fun.