Fresh Garbage - Spirit

The one not-so-great thing about the Sixties and Seventies was that to actually like something, you had to hear it and you had to know about it. To like it, to want to buy it, you had to hear it on the radio or have a friend that had the album and/or was into the band. I saw that Spirit was around, but I'd never heard anything by them. I'd never even read a review. I had only the vague impression that they were serious and worth listening to. There were plenty of records that I knew about, though, and that I wanted to spend money on, and I purchased them instead. So that was that, no Spirit for me.

There are only so many dollars in the world, and when you have spent them, they are gone.

By now we can listen to anything at all and decide for ourselves if we like it. That's a great advantage in life. Not to mention that we don't even have to buy the album to listen to it as many times as we like. We can even download it, free, if we are clever.

(Insert random sentimental comment about the original Napster, gone but not forgotten.)

Good for us now; bad for Spirit then. And probably now, too. The music business has gotten even tougher in the Twenty-First-Century.