Random unedited thoughts on art

If we look at the history of Western art, I think there's a definite point at which the majority of artists changed their view of what they did from a mode of "excellence" to a mode of "originality" (see e.g. this page from Francis A. Waterhouse, "Romantic 'Originality'" in The Sewanee Review Vol. 34, No. 1, Jan. 1926), pp. 40-49). What was valued as excellent changed at various times, but it was still a striving for being "the best" at a certain skill set. Once the modality changes to originality, that whole idea of greatness gets thrown out in favor of "genius," which means being utterly unique and different than everybody else. Not surprisingly this also carries over into personality, so corresponds to the rise of celebrity. If you go to a museum that has art from many different eras, the older the art the less the artwork will be the reflection of a personality. It'll be more the reflection of a culture as a whole, often a highly religious culture. Personality only starts to emerge in the Renaissance and then really takes off during the Enlightenment and Romantic eras into the 20th century by which point artists are basically worshipped as divinely-inspired lunatics (because no personality is more interesting to us than one who is socially deviant. That's also why Showtime has a popular long-running show about a serial killer. And why we love anti-heroes. We love the idea of transgressing society's rules, because we are individualists and we all think we're special even though we deny this, as we must, if anyone asks. It's not that we think we're above the law so much as we think that if we ever broke the law, it would be because we had such a DAMN good reason for it, that it would have to be acceptable. The full implications and consequences of this form of post hoc self-justification/aggrandization are also the main focus of Breaking Bad.)

I'm sure there's plenty more to read on this topic, but the book I can't wait to get my hands on is Original Copy by Robert Macfarlane (obligatory Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Original-Copy-Plagiarism-Originality-Nineteenth-Century/dp/0199296502/). Just from peeking at the first couple of pages in the preview, I'm feeling like I might actually be legitimately onto something with at least some of the stuff I was blathering about in the above paragraph.

I got into this as an investigation into the nature of human creativity versus how that gets expressed in our culture (see my previous post for further thoughts on this). Now, I've heard it argued that consciousness itself is a creative act, and I have no counter-argument to that*. Reality as we experience it is generated entirely by our brains, so it is literally our creation (although, insofar as our minds are shaped through socialization, it might be better to think of this as a "group project"). Perhaps then, rather than a projection of the artist's consciousness, we can think of works of art as lenses through which we can focus the light of our consciousness in order to experience reality in some different way. Art then would be a tool like a microscope or telescope to help one see things one can't normally see (where "seeing" is just an analogue for any possible kind of qualitative sensation, including emotional states as well as sensations).

*There's no qualitative difference between dream-consciousness and waking-consciousness, for example. They both seem real while they're happening, but there's no objective way of determining which one has primacy in terms of an abstract notion of "reality." This goes back to Descartes and the idea that what the senses give us is mere illusion. But there's a problem with framing things this way. An illusion implies that there's an underlying reality. Kant postulated that there is such a thing as an underlying reality but that we have no access to it. (Given the religious underpinnings of his metaphysics, it seems like wanton cruelty on the part of God to instill us with insatiable curiosity under such circumstances.) I think perhaps a better term than "illusion" is "interpretation." Our brains interpret the data collected by our senses, synthesizing it into a construct that has both meaning and use for us. Surely this is a sounder notion than that our senses are somehow constantly fooling us with cheap tricks, almost as if we were rubes at a carnival sideshow or something.

Creation Myth

The following comment, which I've taken from a file-sharing website, exemplifies the misconception in our culture (common since at least the 19th century) of the nature of artistic creation (it's also Exhibit A of why fans are, in general, the worst possible people to review albums). The bare minimum of context you need here is that this reviewer has downloaded the new album by a melodic death metal band and is upset about the perceived "derivative" nature of the music:

Some examples how absurdly derivative this crap is:

Emancipate:
:20 Oh look, it's a Veil of Maya riff and accompanying awful keyboard sound!
:38 baby sounds and music boxes... awesome.
1:05 Hey, it's the ending of the Ancient Covenant minus the robot voice and interesting rhythms! It's even in the same key!
1:47 Holy direct quote of the first part of Devin Townsend's 'The Mighty Masturbator'! Not only is the music and texture (guitar+keys) identical, but even the lyrics and vocal delivery are the same.... I really hope this was deliberately meant as a direct tribute, because it is EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
2:28 Identical strumming pattern, tempo, and chord types to the chorus of The Eidolon Reality, accompanied by two-part vocal harmony in the same way.... yet the chord progression isn't quite similar enough to make it sound like he's establishing a recurring theme, especially since it only comes back in one other song. I'm thinking he's just short on ideas here.
3:30 Mellotron and Akerfeldt's guitar sound and solo style.... sounds straight out of an Opeth song.
3:40 How many times have we heard this kind of arpeggio in a Faceless song now?

Deconsecrate:
0:00 another Opeth solo
1:13 horror carnival bit, similar to the middle of Opeth's 'By the Pain I see in Others', complete with the 'God is Dead' lyric from Opeth's 'The Devil's Orchard'.... Mr. Bungle, Arcturus, Between the Buried in Me and others have pretty much turned the disturbed carnival music into a cliche at this point, and the silly 'la la la' vocals certainly don't help the situation (didn't BTBAM use those?)... the way he says 'my child' also recalls Townsend again, who used those exact lyrics and that exact expression on Deconstruction.
1:26 LOL @ the non-transition
1:36 Hey, it's the intro of The Ancient Covenant, only minus the awesome bass licks!
2:13 see 1:48 of The Ancient Covenant and the intro of Coldly Calculated Design
4:06 It's the outro of Sons of Belial!

Accelerated Evolution
The title is the name of a Devin Townsend album, so I guess it should come as no surprise when there is yet another melodic quote of The Mighty Masturbator in the chorus, this time over a Cynic riff!

In Solitude
0:00 Is this a Metallica cover?
1:58 No, wait - it's an Opeth cover!
2:09 Just kidding, it's a Cynic cover!

etc, etc, etc. In short, I don't think there's a single riff on this album that I can't name a very strong precedent for.

This is so myopic, overly reductive and captious that it almost beggars belief. And yet, although it reads almost like a parody, I chose to highlight this comment because it is typical of the kind of obsessive-compulsive picking-apart engaged in by fans of certain types of "underground" music, particularly certain subgenres of extreme metal. However, this condemnation of so-called "derivative" or "un-original" elements is also characteristic of our culture as a whole and its mythologizing of the creative artist. We think of the (true) artist as this semi-mystical being who communes with the celestial spheres and somehow, like magic, plucks original works out of the ether. They are essentially godlike creators with powers beyond mere mortals.

So powerful is this concept of the artist-deity in our culture that, even when given strong evidence to the contrary, rather than question our assumptions about what it is that artists do, we assume that it is the artist's fault for not living up to our lofty expectations. We dismiss them as ripoffs, charlatans or fakes. In certain cases we even prosecute them for copyright infringement.

Not only is it ludicrous to demand that every individual piece of content within an artistic work is so brand-spanking-new, so mold-breakingly original, that no one has ever seen or heard it before, it is likely impossible. If it were the case that artists were automatons who generated content randomly, regardless of any human concerns, then yes, it would make sense to expect every piece produced by such robotic "artists" would bear little or no resemblance to any other. I needn't belabor the point here: that, in fact, the concerns, thoughts, feelings and abilities of artists are decidedly non-random, for all of the obvious reasons as well as more technical, medium- and genre-specific ones.

That is all general enough. To take the specific example quoted above, the commenter is talking about a new album by an artist within one of his (presumably) favorite genres. He is objecting to the fact that he is able to hear what he considers similar or identical riffs and stylistic approaches, not only to that of other artists' riffs/styles/chord changes, but to riffs/styles/chord changes in other songs by the same artist.

Let's back up a moment here and discuss context. Metal is a genre of popular music with formal conventions so strict that some scene-specific websites (such as metal-archives.com) won't even recognize the existence of certain artists if their output is not deemed "metal" enough. The idea of anyone complaining about the "derivativeness" of such an inherently inbred and self-restrictive musical culture is almost laughable just on the face of it. But to also assert, as the above-quoted metal dude indeed does, that the artists in question are being derivative because of the similarity of their music to THEIR OWN MUSIC is one of the most dizzyingly silly arguments I think I've ever encountered.

The final irony, of course, is that the analysis he gives could be used as an aid to enhancing one's enjoyment of the album. Given that the nature of creativity depends on memorization (every genius you can name has in common the twin powers of enhanced memorization and concentration), the reality is that recombination of pre-existing elements is the main activity of the artist. That, in fact, is what creativity actually is. Creation ex nihilo is a myth. Even our intellectual property laws (which also date from the time in which artists began to be mythologized as some combination of rebels/prophets/deities rather than mere craftsmen as in earlier eras) reflect this superstitious belief. Rather than worship at the altar of artists in a naive celebration of their seemingly mysterious powers, we might try instead to appreciate the very human, very practical craft of what they do. Like a master blacksmith or tailor, a good artist works with the materials at hand to create superior goods. If you're not interested in the kind of thing the craftsman makes, you don't go to that craftsman. You don't blame the blacksmith for being "unoriginal" just because you're bored of horseshoes (or whatever).

As noted above, originality was not always prized in our culture*. Francis A. Waterhouse, in an essay published in The Sewanee Review while he was Professor and Head of Department of Romance Languages at Kenyon College, lays the blame on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote, "If I am not better than other men, at least I am different." Waterhouse continues:

With that famous boast, [Rousseau] started the sophistry that was destined to modify profoundly the basic standards of western civilization. The desire for celebrity is, of course, nothing new, but previous to Rousseau it had been effectively restrained--save in exceptional instances--by the stern necessity of achieving prominence through mastery of the difficult. If you wanted to be noticed, you had to do something better than others. The substitution, on the other hand, of 'different' for 'better' changed all this over night. Different being susceptible of elastic interpretation, people were not slow to realize that it could overlap more easily; if you could not do the thing better, or even as well as others, you could substitute something easier and call attention to its difference.

In other words, once the paradigm changes from excellence to originality, that whole idea of greatness gets thrown out in favor of "genius," which means being utterly unique and different than everybody else. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed--say, while visiting an art museum--that older artworks are much less the reflection of an individual personality and much more the reflection of a culture as a whole. Personality only starts to emerge in the Renaissance and then really takes off during the Enlightenment and Romantic eras into the 20th century, by which point artists are basically worshipped as divinely-inspired lunatics.**

There are many examples in our culture of the vilifying of the act of copying. Even children make fun of "copycats." Cover bands, inkers, ripoff artists, plagiarists

There's also a neat trick pulled off by the advertising industry where they have managed to conflate the concepts of "different," "better" and "new." It's easy to see why this would be a 

If you still think there's something special about originality, try this example on for size: you start watching a film and are introduced to several characters. Do you automatically like the last character to whom you're introduced more than the characters to whom you were introduced earlier? Do you like the last thing that happens in the film more than whatever happened before simply because it's the last thing that happens? (Maybe you do if you hate the film and are happy it's over, but that's another matter). Perhaps you think that's a silly example, but that's really all originality is: it's the latest notion to work its way out of some human being's head. If that's good enough for you, then go ahead and worship at the altar of originality. But don't do so under the illusion that what you're celebrating has been something artists have strived for since the dawn of time, because that's absolutely not the case. 

Instead of pressuring ourselves to be startlingly original all the time, in this current embarrassment of cultural riches within which we find ourselves, we might try connecting the dots a little bit more. A little more synthesis and coalesence, a little less breadth and a little more depth. We needn't worry ourselves unduly about the latest (I had to restrain myself from adding "and greatest") cultural items to aggregate their way onto the front pages of all our favorite blogs and news sites. It may seem incredibly urgent to read and learn about and understand everything new, but remember that's just a bias, an illusion; and one that for most of us has become an addiction. The new has its place, but it doesn't automatically usurp the old until we make the decision to only pay attention to the latest shiny things that move the fastest across our collective field of vision.

Now, I've heard it argued that consciousness itself is a creative act, and I have no counter-argument to that***. Reality as we experience it is generated entirely by our brains, so it is literally our creation (although, insofar as our minds are shaped through socialization, it might be better to think of this as a "group project"). Perhaps then, rather than a projection of the artist's consciousness, we can think of works of art as lenses through which we can focus the light of our consciousness in order to experience reality in some different way. Art then would be a tool like a microscope or telescope to help one see things one can't normally see (where "seeing" is just an analogue for any possible kind of qualitative sensation, including emotional states as well as sensations).

*In Shakespeare's time, for example, audiences "favoured likeness: a work was good not because it was original, but because it resembled an admired classical exemplar, which in the case of comedy meant a play by Terence or Plautus" (The RSC Shakespeare - William Shakespeare Complete Works, Introduction to the Comedy of Errors p. 215). This might be an overgeneralization, but it's certainly the case that Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, borrowed most if not all of his storylines from existing texts.

**No personality is more interesting to us than one who is socially deviant. That's why we love anti-heroes, even serial killer anti-heroes like Dexter. We love the idea of transgressing society's rules, because we are individualists and we all think we're special--even though we deny this, as we must, if anyone asks. It's not that we think we're above the law so much as we think that if we ever broke the law, it would be because we had such a DAMN good reason for it, that it would have to be acceptable. The full implications and consequences of this form of post hoc self-justification/aggrandization are also the main focus of Breaking Bad, perhaps the only truly moral show currently airing on television.

***There's no qualitative difference between dream-consciousness and waking-consciousness, for example. They both seem real while they're happening, but there's no objective way of determining which one has primacy in terms of an abstract notion of "reality." This goes back to Descartes and the idea that what the senses give us is mere illusion. But there's a problem with framing things this way. An illusion implies that there's an underlying reality. Kant postulated that there is such a thing as an underlying reality but that we have no access to it. (Given the religious underpinnings of his metaphysics, it seems like wanton cruelty on the part of God to instill us with insatiable curiosity under such circumstances.) I think perhaps a better term than "illusion" is "interpretation." Our brains interpret the data collected by our senses, synthesizing it into a construct that has both meaning and use for us. Surely this is a sounder notion than that our senses are somehow constantly fooling us with cheap tricks, almost as if we were rubes at a carnival sideshow or something.

Confessions of a 13-year-old charlatan

I've always felt like a charlatan when it comes to writing music. When I started out, right around when I was 13 years old and having had no musical training or background, I couldn't figure out how anybody wrote anything that was any good. So after some frustrating attempts at trying to write something of worth and pretty much failing, I decided to start cheating. I took pieces of music that I hadn't written and claimed them as my own. I did this to impress my friends and peers. If I was ever actually caught doing this, I've blocked it out of my memory. But I did confess willingly at some point to lying about having written a few pieces. I don't remember much about that either but I do know it was quite a relief. So gradually I stopped trying to pass off other people's music as mine.

At some point, maybe a year or two after I had started writing, I started to be able to write things that were decent enough to claim as my own without feeling embarrassed. What's amazing to me now is the amount of pressure I put on myself to be a freaking amazing genius right out of the gate. I never considered that it takes time and lots of practice to become good at composing, just like anything else. I couldn't wait to be great because I needed to seem important and special and really cool right then. So I did whatever I could to cultivate an aura of specialness around me, trying to make it seem like this 13 year old kid had come up with these masterpieces out of nowhere. It must have reeked so hard of desperation.

That poor kid. I feel so bad for him. I wish I could travel back in time and tell him: I understand. You want to be great. You want to be amazing. That's good! But you have to be patient. It's going to take a long time to be as good as those great masters you admire so much. I know that's not what you want to hear. You think there's no time and the end of the world is right around the corner. But it's not. Just keep writing and don't worry about impressing anyone. People are going to like you because you're a good person who is comforting and fun to talk to and be around, not because some piece you wrote impressed them.

A first stab at a rational aesthetics; or, why reading Ulysses is better than eating fried chicken

We are living during a historical moment in which more people have more access to infinitely more information than has ever been possible before. Given that fact, it seems to me that it makes little sense to do what many people seem content to do, which is: find something you like and keep getting more of the same. What we should be doing is learning, about anything and everything, all of the time. Trying new things should not be seen as the pastime of the adventurous; rather, it should be considered the norm. This has nothing to do with recklessness - you don't even have to leave your couch to experience the unfamiliar. The only things you need leave behind are your preconceptions and prejudgments.

What we ought to desire is the best of everything. And by "the best" I don't mean someone else's idea of what that is. I don't mean what is critically acclaimed or popularly beloved. I mean those things (works of art, activities, interests, people, places, whatever) that are unique; I mean those things that are extraordinary either in themselves or in the effects they have; I mean those things that are masterfully crafted (or, in the case of nature, have the appearance of having been masterfully crafted).

I mean, also, those things that excel at being themselves, that have a mission or a set of goals or just a certain nature that is their own. If they have an aim, they might be successful or unsuccessful in that aim, but that's less important. The point is that they know what they are about and they go for it. To take a weirdly random example: a basket of battered, deep-fried chicken. Nobody who eats fried chicken thinks that it's health food. You can see the grease stains on whatever container the chicken is placed in. It's fried chicken! It tastes good because it's full of fat. You can decide for yourself whether you want to risk eating something so unhealthy, but there's really no way to say that fried chicken is lying to you about what it is.

Another example is the novel Ulysses by James Joyce. Both novel and author have been saddled with the derisive label "pretentious" since its publication in 1922. Pretentiousness is an affect that requires willful dishonesty regarding one's own nature: it is an attempt at seeming more important or interesting than one actually is. So here we have a work (and an author) that, unlike fried chicken, is being accused of lying about what it is. But there is a problem with calling a work of art pretentious: almost inevitably, some people will use this label to justify disliking something that is either beyond their intellectual abilities (the irony is that doing this is itself quite pretentious) or in some other way inaccessible to them personally. The more honest thing to do, of course, is to admit that some works are, in way or another, not for us ("us" being the particular critic or set of critics who can't find a way into the work in question). For, regardless of how "difficult" or "tedious" a work may be, how can we possibly know that something (or someone) is being dishonest about its own nature unless we have a thorough and accurate understanding of that nature? My point here is not to argue that Ulysses/Joyce isn't pretentious, only that the label pretentious, as it is most commonly used, is not so much a criterion as an excuse. In any case, we need to establish more fundamental criteria first, in order to decide whether something is, among other things, pretentious.

So how can we go about judging the aesthetic value of our two examples of fried chicken and Ulysses? Qualitatively, they are obviously quite different, as one can tell simply by noting the categories that each item belongs to: food and literature. You could eat a copy of Ulysses, but you would have to have an exceptionally perverse sense of taste in order to find the experience more pleasant than that of eating fried chicken. Conversely, you can't read fried chicken. There is no plot, no characters, no setting and no development. The fried chicken can't tell you anything about the experience of being Irish in early 20th century Dublin, for example. (There is a narrative of how the chicken ended up on your plate, just as there is a story about how a book ends up in your lap; however, what I want to discuss here is not the history of physical objects, but the nature of cultural objects in terms of their aesthetic value.)

We have to judge each type of object or experience on its own terms. It is not, however, simply a matter of assigning an aesthetic value to each cultural object and then deciding to go with whatever has the highest value. Aesthetics is not a quantitative science - not yet, anyway. It's also not a matter of deciding what is most pleasant or fun. Eating fried chicken is a very pleasing experience for many people, but that doesn't change the fact that it isn't a very healthy choice. This is not to say that certain works of art are bad for your health (although they could be), nor that one should choose to consume art based on whether it is somehow "good for you" like eating your vegetables (there was an article in the New York Times last year that pretended to take seriously the analogy between healthy food and "difficult" art, but I believe this analogy is flawed for a number of reasons I won't get into here). I believe there are better ways to judge the aesthetic value of an object or experience:

1. Is this allowing me to experience something new, and if so, is it unique in its ability to deliver this kind of newness to someone who has never experienced it before? (E.g., there is nothing quite like the experience of reading Ulysses, but eating one plate of fried chicken is quite similar to eating another.)

2. If this is not something new per se, is it an example of something that performs in an extraordinary way, or causes me to feel something extraordinary? (E.g., perhaps this particular fried chicken is special in some way - exotic spices or the use of some other rare ingredient.)

3. Is there a sense of quality craftsmanship in this object? Sometimes there is much to admire about something simply in how it was made, and in being a remarkable specimen of its kind. (E.g. Ulysses is a stellar example of the craft of writing. Some plates of fried chicken are cooked better than others.)

4. As discussed above, there is aesthetic value (which, by the way, we can probably admit essentially means beauty) in simply being true to one's own nature. Sometimes flaws - or even outright failure - can be part of what makes something beautiful.

I'm not sure whether the above coheres into a straightforward essay. It may read more like a transcript of a thought process. Be that as it may, I welcome your feedback. What do you think about these criteria for evaluating an object or experience in terms of aesthetic value? Do you agree that they are valid or not? What criteria would you add? Do you think it's a mistake to even try to create a rational theory of aesthetics? Is this all complete bollocks? Let me know.

Mac Mini: The Haunting

Last August, I made up a little short story on Twitter that I thought was mildly hilarious. Nobody saw it because I have about 12 followers. So I'm reposting it here even though it's going to seem odd to read a whole bunch of tweets as one long thing. You kind of have to imagine you're getting these one at a time. It also helps a whole lot if you have heard Ween's album The Pod. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this thing even 10% as much as I do:

Just put Ween's "Pod" album in my iTunes and the dock icon started jumping up and down like it was in pain.

Playing Ween's "The Pod" album. That's weird - usually iTunes doesn't stop after every song and ask if I'm sure I want to continue.

Playing Ween's "The Pod" album. The screen keeps getting darker and I have to keep turning up the brightness. Must be a new OSX bug.

The song "Pollo Asado" just ended. A dialog box came up in iTunes that just asked, "Why?" Had to click the "I'm sorry" button.

Listening to The Pod. All good. I guess iTunes got over itself. Although my Mac does seem strangely warm to the touch.

Went upstairs to get some lunch, left music playing. When I came back, my Mac was leaking. Some Macs have liquid coolant. Mine doesn't.

Just made it through "Molly." My Mac mini is now cold as ice to the touch.

These new Macs are so advanced! After playing Ween's "The Pod" album for 45 minutes, it's in a corner of the room making a cocoon.

Mac mini emerged from cocoon. Scurried under my bed - didn't get a good look. Ween album still blaring somehow. On phone now with Apple. 

Had no idea the Genius Bar did house calls, but I guess they're coming over. Also, is there a computer term that sounds like "exorcism"?

For those of you who missed my live tweets earlier today, I put on Ween's album "The Pod" and my Mac mini wept & became a giant insect.

Later on, some Genius Bar peeps came by. There was a lot of chanting and consulting of scrolls. I guess it was pretty serious.

It was touch and go for a while; a few of the geniuses were partially devoured. The blood… well, let's just say the carpet will never quite be the same.

But in the end, they managed to banish the demon possessing my computer back to the parallel dimension from which it came. And recover my data!

So I guess the lesson I've learned is: always go for the extended warranty. You just never know.

Google, Amazon and Apple all want you to stick your music in a cloud. Meanwhile, as we all know, Facebook has teamed up with Spotify to hook you into a cloud with music already in it. I can't tell who's gonna win this fight, if anyone, so I'm trying everything. Here are my reviews of each puffy cloud:

1. Spotify - Unlike Amazon, Apple and Google, Spotify doesn't let you upload anything. Instead, you can play anything in their library for free (plus anything it finds on your hard drive). As the partnership with Facebook would suggest, Spotify places a strong emphasis on social listening. You can see what your friends are listening to, subscribe to their playlists and even listen to music together with Soundrop (one of several "apps" now available from within Spotify, which is itself a stand-alone application). Spotify is a lot of fun, simpler to use in many respects than the other 3 cloud apps, and is particularly suited for exploring new sounds. It's also great in that, although you do have to download the app to use it, you don't have to spend any time uploading or "matching" songs. There is also a mobile app for Android and iOS, but you'll have to pay $10 a month to use it.

2. iTunes Match - To use this, you need to have songs in an iTunes library and you can't have more than 25,000 songs (not including iTunes Store purchases). Assuming you meet those two qualifications, for $25 a year you can keep all your songs in the cloud. Since the iTunes Store likely already has a copy of most of the songs in your library, it only uploads what it needs to. This can save a whole lot of time and is one of the cooler features of iTunes Match. Obviously if you don't like iTunes and/or don't have an iOS device, this is not for you.

3. Google Music - You're limited to 20,000 songs but unlike Apple, Google actually lets you pick and choose what gets uploaded. If you have more than 20,000 songs, you can still use the service - you can either let Google choose 20,000 for you or pick them yourself. Upload speeds are good but unlike Apple, you really do have to upload every single song. Of course, since it's Google they not only support Android devices but also iOS (via HTML5). Google also supports a decent range of filetypes: not only mp3 and aac but also wma, ogg and FLAC (although some of these get transcoded to mp3 format after uploading, which is a bummer). But probably the nicest thing about Google Music is that you don't need to download a separate app to play your songs - they'll play right from your web browser on music.google.com. Actually, scratch that - the nicest thing about Google Music is that it's completely free.

4. Amazon Cloud Player - This is marketed more like a side benefit of buying Amazon Cloud storage. If you plunk down $20 (or more if you want more storage) for 20GB, you also get unlimited music uploading. Plus, like Google you can play your music from any web browser. There's also an app for Android and iPad (although not iPhone, oddly). This would probably beat Google Music's sorry ass except for two things: 1. Fewer file formats are supported (only mp3 and aac, although at least there are no transcoding shenanigans) and 2. The Uploader app is a total piece of shit. This really disappointed me - I was all set to let the uploader run for a week or so, uploading my 80,000+ songs (what, you don't have that many? I guess you must hate music) but then I noticed every time it would finish uploading a song, it would sit there for 2-3 minutes before continuing to the next one! If you do a little multiplication, that means it would take somewhere between 160,000-240,000 minutes to upload all of my songs. That's about 3-6 months. I think I'll wait for them to fix that bug.