Being a good little capitalist, I am motivated to some degree by money.  I’m sure that most of us are in some way, more or less.  Money isn’t everything, but it definitely helps some things along.

So, I think these two things are very appropriate.  First yet another high tech alarm clock, but this time I must say it’s got a very good solution to the problem of sleeping in with the snooze button.  Basically you configure the SnuzNLuz to deduct a preset amount from your account and donate it to a non-profit organization you hate every time you press the snooze button.  It connects to the web and yanks real money from your account automatically.  As the tagline reads:  “Wake up to the smell of…Animosity…”.  Not a bad idea for chronic snoozers, but there’s not much fear of many donations in my house.  Sleep is the scarcest resource there.

 Then it’s off to stickk.com where you basically wager against yourself that you will achieve a goal.  Pick a goal, set a date to achieve it and place a monetary amount against that goal.  If you succeed you get your money back, if you fail your money goes either to a charity or to a pre-determined “enemy” of yours.  It’s brilliant.  The idea of entering into a contract with yourself to actually get something done is something I really like.  It’s not easy sticking to goals sometimes, this definitely takes it up a notch.  The best part is you determine a third party referee that is the judge on whether or not you actually succeeded in your goals and has to report in to the website or you have “failed” for that reporting period.  Goals are the usual; lose weight, quit smoking, exercise regularly, etc or you can make up your own goals. 

I really like this, I have actually signed up and I’m thinking of creating a commitment to get to the gym at least 4 times a week.  It’s pretty fun, I suggest you give it a try.

As I have written many times before, I tend to be an old fashioned sort when it comes to music.  I never use torrents or anything else to download music without paying.  I just think that however broken and corrupt the music industry is (and it is), it’s not fair to take something that someone made with their own two hands and not pay for it.  The artists may be getting screwed, but that’s still the deal they entered into, so it’s not fair to deny them the 7 cents they actually get from each CD. 

Similarly, I can’t abide buying music from iTunes or any other music store that uses any kind of copy protection (I know that some songs are available on iTunes without that protection).  So as a rule, I almost always buy real CDs.  There’s a couple of reasons this still makes sense for me.  There are several iPods in the house now, so we have one consolidated music library (we have for some time actually).  That same library is used by the living room player (Audiotron).  The problem starts here, because while the Audiotron can play many formats, it cannot play any protected content.  So if I buy anything that is protected, I have to strip that protection before I can store it once and play it anywhere.  That’s a pain in the neck for me, even though there are lots of good utilities out there that can do that.  So, I have been stuck with CDs, which is not all that bad since they also serve as a great backup.

So I was recently reading about how Amazon is becoming a large source of unprotected MP3 content and I thought, well I should give that a try.  The very large rub is you can’t buy those MP3s from Amazon if you live in Canada.  Probably a licensing thing, but that really sucks.  So I started to wonder where I could buy songs from in Canada, and that led me to eMusic and the topic of this rambling post.

I actually joined eMusic 5 years ago to have a look.  It didn’t seem to have a whole lot of content then, but things have changed considerably since then.  I reopened my account and for free I got my initial 30 MP3 downloads for free.  That’s pretty good when you stack it up to iTunes at .99c per song.  The basic subscription is $10 per month for 30 downloads.  I can cancel anytime and just keep the downloads I have.  That’s the best part about this subscription, it’s more like an access fee to a music buffett.  You don’t lose your “rights” to your music if you decide to stop paying.  The files themselves are unrestricted MP3 files at 192KB (which is the only slight downside since I usually rip everything a little higher than that, but really it’s not that big an issue) so I don’t have to do anything to them before I file them into the library at home.  Pretty sweet.

The big thing that gave me pause before was the selection of music on there.  There are no big label artists at all, just independents.  That takes a little getting used to, but after an hour or so of browsing and listening, I actually found lots of stuff I will probably be downloading.  I’m getting into the punk a little bit now, (just don’t ask, it’s a mid-life crisis thing) and there’ s tons of good stuff on there that needs listening to (I can almost see Noonan smugly nodding behind his beer).  I can see me getting my 30 songs a month without any problem at all, so the value is there.

So I can actually recommend this site to you folks now.  Go sign up and get your 30 free songs, and then quit if you want.  Strange that this doesn’t bother me in the least, but I won’t actually steal the songs directly.  I guess I have flexible morals. 

Speaking of flexible morals, if you are going to sign up, drop me a line and I will invite you to join.  If you do join I get more songs for free, so that’s a very selfish motive, but it doesn’t cost you anything either, right?  :-)