Here is a plain and simple story of how the internet has changed my life. (Whether or not it has changed my life for the better is open to debate.) The following is a typical occurrence; it is not unusual.

It’s Wednesday night. Kris and I are watching the goofy-fun Alias. Sydney and Vaughn, American secret agents, are posing as Russian secret agents wanting to pose as Chechnyan agents who will pose as typical Americans so that they can detonate an electro-magnetic pulse. To wipe out the stock market.

Or something like that.

A commercial comes on — I’m not sure for what — and a melancholy poppy synth piece begins to play. I catch the following words: “And all the things I had in mind for you and me, well say something new, say something new”.

I love the song.

I get up from the futon, walk three steps to the computer, pull up google and search on the lyrics. After one misstep (caused by overenthusiastic use of quotation marks), I find five matches to my search, all relating to a Swedish band called The Concretes. Most are reviews (1, 2, 3), but one is a page entitled Your Concrete Multimedia Experience. It features mp3 snippets and bits of lyrics from several songs.

I fire up Acquisition (a Mac file-sharing program — if you own a Mac, you should own this program) and search for songs by The Concretes. Before the commercials are over, before Sydney and Vaughn can resume their surreal existence, I am playing a song by a group I had never heard of two minutes before.

This is one way the internet has changed my life.


By the way, the song used in the commercial, “Say Something New”, is okay, but not as good as I’d hoped. “You Can’t Hurry Love“, however, is outstanding. (And not the song you think it is.) I’ve posted a full mp3 copy of the song here (right-click and “save as…” if, like Jeremy, you cannot get this to play with a left-click). If you like The Concretes as much as I do, I encourage you to support them by purchasing a CD (also available via the iTunes Music Store). I plan to.

(See? This is how file-sharing works. Or should work.)

Pre-Crash Comments

On 28 January 2005 (07:38 AM),
dowingba said:

It’s not how it should work, it’s how it does work. Despite what the record companies say, it has been proven beyond any doubt that file sharing actually increases record sales. The only thing hurting sales is the record companies’ own conduct, which has caused many people to completely boycott major labels.

On 28 January 2005 (08:20 AM),
Tiffany said:

Rich and I watched the new ‘Numb3rs’ show and after 10 minutes I still could not figure out where I had seen the actor playing the math genius. IMDB.com to the rescue. He played Wednesday’s boyfriend in ‘Adam Family Values’.

On 28 January 2005 (10:57 AM),
Paul said:

With much sarcasm Paul types:

The power of of the internet? I used email to contact you this summer to tell you about a great song “You Can’t Hurry Love” by The Concretes. The internet could have allowed us to express your appreciation of the song and others like it on the new album. However, you were unable to capture that moment and I am left to read that some comercial on tv has turned you on, through some research of your own, to an “outstanding” song! Don’t worry about me, I will keep telling the ad executives to place those song snipets into the ads you see so that we can share our very similar musical tastes.

Look forward to hearing West Indian Girls and Kasabian in the future! BUT YOU DIDN’T HEAR THAT FROM ME!

Viva KEXP!

On 28 January 2005 (11:12 AM),
Denise said:

We like sarcastic Paul! (At least I do.)

The internet reunited me with my old college boyfriend, who is now my fiancée and will be my husband on April 1st.

The internet also let me plan our wedding in 3 hours. Nice.

The internet reunited me with the AWL and his better half, Kris.

The internet has also allowed me to meet great people I really enjoy whom I would not have met any other way.

AND, after being laid-off for 8 months and applying for ANY job I could qualify or over-qualify for, I finally found my job from a job-posting I found on the internet.

I sound like I owe my whole life to the internet. Not quite, but my life is a whole lot better than it would be if there was no internet.

On 28 January 2005 (11:17 AM),
Jeremy said:

The mp3 doesn’t download.

On 28 January 2005 (11:20 AM),
J.D. said:

HA!

Paul is right. For once. 🙂

My man is on the musical vanguard, weeding out the chaff so I don’t have to. But I hardly ever listen to what he says. (To my loss.)

For the record, here’s the e-mail he sent me on Sept. 30th, nearly four months ago:

Citizen Cope – The Clarence Greenwood Recordings (Arista/RCA) Bullet and a Target is the best song of the summer of 2004!

Drive-By Truckers – The Dirty South (New West) Alt.country done well

The Concretes – The Concretes (Astralwerks) female lead singer both sensual and tough

DJ Krush – Jaku (Sony Japan) Always good

Guided by Voices – Half Smiles of the Decomposed (Matador) Some good tracks from an old school garage band

The Prodigy – Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned (Maverick) Up-tempo!

DJ Shadow – In Tune and On Time Live! (Geffen) He keeps remixing his own stuff and it keeps getting better!

Kosheen came on to my radar screen this year and melded powerful female vocal and electronica.

PJ Harvey Uh Oh rocks, but not as an album. listen to it shuffled into similar music.

KEXP ROCKS!!!! Please support them with a check. It’s almost like listening to iTunes in my opinion.

I think what happened here is that I listened to “Bullet and a Target”, but didn’t like it. After that I let the rest of the list slide…

On 28 January 2005 (03:08 PM),
Jenn said:

If you are on a mac with only a trackpad you can hold down the option key and click on the above link to dowload the mp3 to your desktop.

On 08 April 2005 (07:55 PM),
WF said:

What a hoot! This blog was the first thing I found when searching for that same snippet of lyrics, having seen that same commercial (it’s for Target, by the way). Very helpful… saved me a lot of research.

On 08 May 2005 (10:55 PM),
ViciousMonkeyKiller said:

Ha! Ditto to what WF said.

On 11 September 2005 (05:45 PM),
krin said:

i feel compelled to tell you that i was just sitting here, surfing the net.. when that commercial came on and i thought “i must find out what that song is.” i did a search on google and found this. ha!

On 17 September 2005 (05:54 AM),
abby said:

yay! thank you! i was just searching the same song and i didn’t even have the lyrics right! horray for the internet…now i’ll go find it on itunes 🙂

On 04 October 2005 (06:27 PM),
D said:

“You can’t hurry love” is in the Elizabethtown soundtrack/movie. (I’m sure Cameron Crowe had the drop on it before anyone else outside of the industry did.)

On 04 October 2005 (11:11 PM),
ardvrk said:

Wow – haven’t any of you heard of AdTunes?

http://quidnunc.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=26

Google is great, don’t get me wrong, but you can narrow your search a LOT with AdTunes, and obviously the more people use it, the better it gets.

The internet is the best thing EVER. Don’t buy into their crap that it distances people, isolates them, etc. It brought ALL of us here to this site to discuss it, didn’t it? Because of a SONG? All of us, with our different lives, with our different politics, with our different computers. All united by a song – and the internet.

2 Replies to “The Power of the Internet”

  1. Brandon says:

    This same thing happened to me, I have a sort of obsession with music from tv commercials.

  2. Betsy Markum says:

    I can’t believe it, my co-worker just bought a car for $67074. Isn’t that crazy!

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