Spotify

A bit of nostalgia for the old folks. After far too many years absence (for absence read incompetent management by the Zappa Family Trust) [wikipop]The Mothers[/wikipop] and [wikipop]Frank Zappa[/wikipop]’s catalogue returns to the virtual racks. CDs and downloads can be purchased from your favourite store. iTunes has a dedicated page:

and they can all be found on Spotify too. The wayward Spotify cataloguing system means that you will need to play hide and seek to find some… Fillmore East – June 1971, for example, can be found in the Appears On addendum. At least it is catalogued as 1971; all the others seem to date from 2012! The iTunes store has gone for a mix and match approach some correct dates and some 2012:

Thankfully We’re Only In It For The Money is not the moronic remixed abomination that Zappa did in the mid 1980’s but Cruising With Ruben & The Jets still suffers from the inflicted nonsense. Lumpy Gravy returns as Part One and two rather than the individually entitled sections from the CD releases. Uncle Meat still includes the pointless excerpts from the [wikipop search=”Uncle Meat (film)”]movie soundtrack[/wikipop] and the anachronistic ‘Tengo Na Minchia Tanta” but they can be deleted from your expansive Mothers/Zappa Spotify playlist to restore the original track listing as can the “extra” tracks from Freak Out! and Absolutely Free if you have the UK versions encoded within your DNA and find their inclusion distracting.

What will anyone unfamiliar with the works make of it all? From Lumpy Gravy to Francesco Zappa it is a diverse body of work. With the alphabetical Spotify listing
and no relevant dates it will require some considerable homework to piece it all together.

(Update: A user has made a chronological playlist to ease the chore)

I am fully loaded and available off line

For now… here’s Mr Undertaker

Zappa, constantly battling with record companies, devised a system for downloading music, which you would then record on tape, but this was a decade before the Internet became usable for anybody and so was never implemented.

We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company’s difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user’s home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (SONY consumer level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a rentable D-A converter in the phone itself . . . the main chip is about $12).

All accounting for royalty payments, billing to the customer, etc. would be automatic, built into the initial software for the system.

The consumer has the option of subscribing to one or more Interest Categories, charged at a monthly rate, without regard for the quantity of music he or she decides to tape.

Providing material in such quantity at a reduced cost could actually diminish the desire to duplicate and store it, since it would be available any time day or night.

Monthly listings could be provided by catalog, reducing the on-line storage requirements of the computer. The entire service would be accessed by phone, even if the local reception is via TV cable.

The advantage of the TV cable is: on those channels where nothing ever seems to happen (there’s about 70 of them in L.A.), a visualization of the original cover art, including song lyrics, technical data, etc., could be displayed while the transmission is in progress, giving the project an electronic whiff of the original point-of-purchase merchandising built into the album when it was ‘an album’, since there are many consumers who like to fondle & fetish the packaging while the music is being played. In this situation, Fondlement & Fetishism Potential [F.F.P.] is supplied, without the cost of shipping tons of cardboard around.

We require a LARGE quantity of money and the services of a team of mega-hackers to write the software for this system. Most of the hardware devices are, even as you read this, available as off-the-shelf items, just waiting to be plugged into each other so they can put an end to “THE RECORD BUSINESS” as we now know it.