JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Mentor Questions Forum Newsweek Interview with Michael Laskow

Makes sense, it eventually has to go in that direction, largely because of computers and the internet.

For example, last year I really enjoyed the services of "Press Play". They had around 300,000 songs in their catalog and I could play any one or all of them for a flat fee of $9.95 per month conveniently charged to my credit card account. The selection was excellent and I could pick & choose from oldies, newbies and everything in-between in a full range of styles & genres.

As a song writer, this kind of service is indespensible to me because I can quickly compare my own style or intended direction (when needed) with other artists & styles that have already been well know.

Of course I only have so many hours per day or week to be listening, so I doubt I ever listened to more than an average of a few songs a day. If I listened to 10 songs a month, that would be $1.00 each, but if I listened to 100 a month, that would work out to about 10 cents a piece, not bad right?

The coolest thing is that it's not like radio where to have to listen to everything that comes along. I enjoyed the idea that I can quickly find and play just about any known or even lesser know artist, plus also search strictly by the various genre catagories or "pop" songs & hits, etc. ranging from the 1930's up through each decade till today.

To me, this kind of service is even better than cable TV, because it's so "interactive" in the sense that I can stream or download any specific song title or artist's song on an "on demand" basis with instant results! It's a real time saver and I end up being able to find what I'm looking for about 3 out of 4 times, not a bad average out of 300,000 + titles!

Now, let's see, how long would it take one person at say 2 hours a day to listen to 300,000 songs? Ha, I'll leave that up to all of you math experts, but let's say by the time you heard them all, you could have written a few of your own tunes, right?!

See you,
Michael

P.S. Oh, by the way... last fall "PressPlay" changed their name to "Napster". In my opinion, I thought that was kind of a dumb move, because "PressPlay" had already built a great reputation up to that time, at least in my "book" in terms of price & service. However, I understand that they did upgrade their content (library) through some other mergers, up to over 500,000 songs.

The only problem is that now their service won't work on the Windows '98 operating system. They are forcing folks to migrate to Windows 2000 or something like that. I wasn't ready to migrate because of potential internet security problems that Microsoft is know to have with systems above their older (proven) "Windows '98". In time, hopefully those issues will be addressed, let's see.