Don’t think I’ve forgotten that time I said I was going to go back and listen to the albums which spawned popular singles. I didn’t forget; I just got sidetracked, and am amazingly lazy.

My friend @Mindstrike mentioned that he had this bad boy at his mother’s house, sitting in the basement, possibly doing nothing, so he was kind enough to let me borrow it for a spell. It’s got a CD player and two cassette decks which work. At the time of writing this, the only cassette I have was one I found in my wife’s stash of things she brought from her parent’s house before they sold it: Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I do have two cassettes on order but they won’t be arriving for at least another month for Reasons I Can Only Assume Have To Do With Modernity; I can’t believe artists or labels have a lot of new cassettes on hand these days.

That’s made me think that my idea of going back to the well isn’t such a great — or more specifically, economical — idea. Case in point: I spent this morning going through my Bandcamp follow list. A few days ago I listened to a selection of songs from various artists and put the ones I thought I might like on follow. As these were one-off tracks I couldn’t be sure I’d like their entire opus, or even an entire album, so this method was a cheap and potentially misleading way of bookmarking the folks I wanted to check out later in more depth. I did go back and listen to several of them today, and after sorting though a few, I narrowed it down to 10 albums that represent nine artists I’d like to buy into. Out of those 10 albums, I purchased five digital downloads in part because they’re less expensive than buying physical media, especially since there’s no shipping cost involved. To buy a cassette album can run from $12 on up depending on the capacity of the album, the edition, etc. To get it shipped would be another $7+, which could possibly be mitigated by bulking the albums together in one order; I don’t know. My endgame thought, though, was that once I have digital files, I could transfer them to good old fashioned reel-to-reel if I want to. On the other hand, I can also just download them to my phone and have them all with me all the time, all at once, without having to carry additional packaging or what have you.

I’m currently listening to my purchases, and had considered enumerating them here, but I don’t think I’ve got enough experience with them to provide more than just a cursory list which I don’t think would do any of them justice. So once I feel like I’ve gotten a handle on them, I might give them each their own post, or might lump them in by purchase date or something, just in case someone is interested.