Kid Charlemagne
Steely Dan
The Royal Scam, 1976

I watched the Grammys this year after skipping them since whatever year the head of RIAA ended the show saying something to the effect of “please stop downloading music – you don’t want the music to stop, do you?” That was a real “wow” moment for me. I always knew the record executives wanted to save their a$$es and their nice apartments/houses but that was the first time that I considered that they actually believed that music would “stop” if they went out of business.

So few artists ever get a dime from major record companies (literally less than 10%) that it’s preposterous to think that all artists would say, “if I’m not going to get royalty checks then I’m going to just stop making music.” Most artists that don’t have multiple platinum albums make all of their money off of touring and merchandise as it is. No doubt that having an album out on a major label is great press and would help with those things but it’s definitely not required. No big surprise: record companies are now desperately attempting to make touring and merchandise part of their contracts.

What does all this have to do with this MP3? Not much other than it’s a song that was sampled on Kanye West’s grammy-award winning “Graduation” album. Kanye used this on “Champion” which is one of the songs that I liked from that album. I’m sitting here trying write something about how hearing the sample makes the Kanye track disappointing but I can’t front, I still like how he used it (even though he says things as stupid as, “I shop so much I could speak Italian.”)

>> songs are available for two weeks (192 kbps) [6.2 MB]
>> songs are available for two weeks (320 kbps) [10.3 MB]

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Music Appreciation, Sampled, Vinyl Recordings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.