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.)
This same thing happened to me, I have a sort of obsession with music from tv commercials.
I can’t believe it, my co-worker just bought a car for $67074. Isn’t that crazy!