I took my 9 year old daughter to her first concert last night.  The band was Lifehouse, a relatively newish, great alternative rock band. 

I had seen them last summer as an opening act for the Goo Goo Dolls.  I hadn't heard of Lifehouse before but was very impressed with their "big" sound.  After that concert I bought two of their CDs.  Yeah I'm one of those guys who still buys CDs because I despise DRM and I don't want to buy compressed/encoded (lossy) music.  I'd rather do the compression and encoding myself.  Plus I'll always have access to the raw, uncompressed music for future re-encoding in better formats. 

Regarding DRM, I despise it because it isn't user friendly.  It tends to be tied to a particular device instead of a person.  Devices come and go and the pushups you have to go through to deactivate one device and activate another get to be a right pain in the rear.  This is one of the reasons I stopped using Audible.com.  I got tired of the whole deactivation/activation dance every year.  Yeah, I go through new devices that often.

One very unfortunate downside to the ease with which music can be copied is piracy.  I'm both a musician and a software developer so the notion of protecting intellectual property and copyrighted material hits close to home.  After the concert, my daughter and I got to meet the band members who were signing autographs.  What a great bunch of guys!  They were all down to earth and very nice.  I even got a picture of my daughter with Jason Wade - the lead singer.  She was thrilled.  :-)

I told them that I had seen them a year ago opening for the Goo Goo Dolls whom they were touring with.  I asked if that helped boost CD sales because touring with GGD had to expose them to a wider audience.  The reply shouldn't have surprised me but there is nothing like hearing it come right from the horse's mouth.  Their guitarist said that CD sales across the industry have tanked.  The only way they're making money these days is by touring, touring and more touring.  That's a shame.  I have no idea how to solve this problem but it starts with folks internalizing that copying copyrighted music without paying for it is stealing.  That's certainly what I'll be teaching my kids.

Give Lifehouse a listen, they have some really good tunes and if you like what you hear, buy it.  We need to support the arts, right?  My favorite songs?  Well most folks will recognize Hanging by a Moment but my favorite is First Time followed closely by Who We Are and Bridges. 

BTW for you PowerShellers, check out this album cover:

The bald headed guy, who is Lifehouse's drummer, looks an awful lot like PowerShell's language designer - Bruce Payette.  Check out this picture of Bruce on Amazon. I wonder if someone is leading a double life.  :-)  OK now back to our regularly scheduled PowerShell programming.