(February 23, 2007) — No one can deny that the influence of the Internet on music in recent years has been phenomenal. Small-time bands having difficulty getting through to the public no longer have to put all their hopes of success just into getting a record deal—instead, if they really have good music and mass appeal, a popular method has been to get so hyped up on the Internet that record labels come to them. Obscure bands can hope to gain publicity by designing banners or making their music available for download or play, hoping fans will post the banners on their Myspace profile pages or add their songs so that they play whenever someone visits their profile. Music promotion website purevolume.com is listed as the fastest growing music community, with over 360,000 profiles of rising artists, 315,000 songs available for free download, and over 750,000 registered listeners (according to the Purevolume homepage). The Top 10 most listened to artists listed on the Purevolume homepage include a relatively even amount of popular but obscure bands like Starlit Platoon, Maps and Atlases, and Anberlin as well as already well-known bands such as Fall Out Boy and hellogoodbye. As revolutionary and amazing as these changes have been, like every advance in technology, it comes with an unexpected price. Even as a person that boasts about my large collection of music, even though I haven’t bought an album since Reinventing Axle Rose over two years ago, I still have to say that there’s a certain undeniable connection you get with an album that comes with actually going out and spending your hard-earned money to buy a record, taking it home, unwrapping it and listening to it in your room while going over every aspect of the album jacket. This indescribable connection definitely can’t be recreated when all you have to do to get an album is simply type the name of the band into a search engine and sit back a few minutes while it’s effortlessly downloaded into your computer. And who would ever have thought that having access to thousands of great bands literally at your fingertips, ready to stream straight into your headphones, would be a bad thing? Well, first of all it makes it hard to distinguish the quality bands from the garbage— but most significantly, somehow it makes the music feel so cheap and disposable. Being able to scroll down to a band’s “Influences” or Top 8 on their Myspace page often gives you a plethora of similar sounding bands. It’s a difficult concept to swallow—even when it comes to your favorite band, there are probably hundreds of bands that sound almost exactly the same. Like always, the price of increased technology is missing out on what you would get if you actually took the time and effort to do things the way they would have to be done otherwise. Why is there a need to go see a band in concert and experience their live performance anymore? All you have to do is search on video databases such as Youtube and you immediately have the latest stream from last night’s show. But fans that resort to this method are ultimately missing out on the most important part of seeing a band live, which is the energy the band gives off to the crowd that the crowd reverberates back— that intangible experience you have to be there to feel. And any integrity and real interest in music that was the reason for the existence of local scenes is gone, because what’s the point of going out and talking to people to discover new music when all you have to do is a simple search on Google? Ultimately, what’s a completely radical breakthrough in the way people look at music and the way the music industry works can also have a reverse effect. It makes the music feel not so special—and that, my friends, is just not cool.