Create or Consume?
By Stevie Z
Well, it’s that time of the year again: time for either myself or The Luverly Michelle™ to purchase something for ourselves. Every year at Christmas we are ‘allowed’ to buy something worth more money then we would usually spend. I don’t mean ‘allowed’ by each other, but more along the lines of it taking most of the year to save up the cash to purchase something that costs a little extra dough. Each Christmas we buy each other a few smaller things, and then we alternate each year on whom gets the bonus ‘goodie’.
Just to clarify - we’re not talking thousands of dollars here, last year I got an M-Audio MIDI controller keyboard, this year Michelle is getting a sewing machine. These things generally amount to only a few hundred bucks.
Since this year is Michelle’s year to get ‘The Big One’, it’s my year to get smaller stuff. I’m always easy to buy for as far as the category of gifts go - something music-related. See? Easy. Where it gets agonizing is trying to decide which subcategory I’m leaning towards. I look at it as 2 choices.
Creation Vs. Consumption.
Since I’m also a songwriter, and am aspiring to be a producer/engineer to some degree as well, I’m always looking at acquiring the stuff I need to achieve my goal of creating great songs, whether writing and playing my own, or helping someone else with theirs.
While I know some people have a bad case of G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) wherein they’re always pining after (and buying!) the latest, greatest guitar/mic/software/effects, etc, I have a very concrete idea of what I want to achieve, and know what I need to get it. I’ve never been a fan of newest/shiniest anyways, not when older/used/less expensive gets the job done.
At the other end of the equation sits Consumption. By this I mean the act of listening to music that others have created, such as the latest Corb Lund album. My MP3 player is an older Sansa SanDisk 8GB, and it’s starting to show it’s age. When you think that I use it for an average of 4-5 hours per day for listening to podcasts and music in a not-so-healthy-for-electronics environment, I believe it’s held up amazingly well, and was a very good buy. The only problems are, as I say, it’s getting older, and starting to act a little eccentric now and again, and also, for some reason nobody (including Sansa or Apple apparently) understands, my Mac won’t acknowledge the fact that it exists when I plug it in. This means that I have to download music and podcasts to a memory stick, then use a windows (ick) based machine to transfer it to my MP3 Player.
I know, I know. I keep thinking it too: “Good lord you lazy bastard, 10 years ago the technology for this kind of portable music player wasn’t even within your grasp, and now you’re bitching because it takes you an extra 5 minutes to be able to perform the miracle of being able to hear whatever music you want, whenever you want!” Yeah, it is kind of nit-picky. And also, I feel really guilty whenever I think “man, I wish this thing was bigger then 8GB so I could have more music on it.” I mean, seriously? My first computer had, I believe, a 256k hard drive! 8GB is a lot of tunes. I don’t really need an iPod….I mean, they’re neato, and shiny, and do lots of neat stuff, and if I spend enough on one (an iPod Touch, for example has music creation apps available for it) then I can kind of bridge the gap between creation and consumption. But we’re talking $400 plus, and I can’t really justify that, not even to myself, never mind Michelle. Actually, Michelle is a lot more easy-going about that kind of thing.
So to help me decide, I asked myself the following question:
Do I want the ability to be able to listen to Peter Judd’s songs wherever and whenever I want to, which I can already do, but make it slightly easier, or do I want the ability to help amazing songwriters like a Peter Judd or a Robbie Hancock get their songs out so other people can hear them?
Feedback from other people who share this dilemma is welcome…..
Stevie Z
