It’s the new Hold Steady album! It’s another cracker (though not as instantly loveable as Boys & Girls…) and those of us who bought the limited edition get three extra tracks.

I’m trying to stay positive here.

Extra tracks would normally be a good thing, as long as they’re put on an extra disc. Taking an album that’s been arranged, produced and designed to be listened to from start to finish and then whacking three extras on the end throws the balance of the album off.

When you take those tree tracks and put them on the disc as one fucking track then you’re just stupid.

And that’s what we have here. I just put the album in the cd-rom to rip it and track twelve is twelve minutes long and called “Ask Her for Adderall \ Cheyenne Sunrise \ Two Handed Handshake” so if one of the latter tracks becomes a favourite I’ll have to skip past others to find it.

Audacity, here I come.

This is incredibly stupid and overbearing. I’m on my third dedicated mp3 player (let’s leave aside my mobile phone, my laptop, my DS, my 360) so they want me to pay for all the music three times over? No thanks. I don’t put it all on my players anyway so why should I pay a levy on it? No reason at all.

The current discussions around intellectual property, rights, paying and downloading are all fascinating to me but it never ceases to amaze me when some arse-backwards idea like this comes out of the woodwork.

In discussions with friends I’ve often said that if Oink had existed as a pay service I’d have paid. Well apparently there is something a bit like it; emusic. I hadn’t come across it before but a Facebook status from Alex sent me off to buy a new Laura Cantrell EP and I got to reading and it seems like a reasonable deal. I’m not sure I like the “number of tracks per month” model but that’s cos I listen to whole albums and not selected tracks. I’d also prefer a wider range of bitrate options (there’s one) but on the whole I like the idea and I’ve stumped up for a basic account so I’ll see what I can get for my money.

My Dad sat and taped the 12 episode repeat of Operation Luna in what must have been the late 80s/early 90s and I must have come close to wearing the tapes thin over the years. It’s still the only serial I’ve heard as they’re no longer commercially available. At least, not reasonably.

Both Operation Luna and The Red Planet have been released with remastered recordings in CD presentation sets but are no longer available and the third was never released because of poor sales. Now all you can get it DRMed .wma files from a handful of online retailers. You know, the kind that say “you can only download it once, if you fuck up then tough” and “these files are only compatible with a Windows Media Device” or “here, pay £2.50 an episode for a 20 episode serial and rest assured it’s a good bitrate, honest”. Fuck that.

Sure, I could buy them, work my way around the copy protection and end up with proper, unencumbered mp3 files but that goes against the grain. I’d happily pay for the expensive CD sets, the only reason I didn’t back then was a lack of disposable income. Stupidly, I should have just bit the bullet and done it. I was working at HMV with a 30% discount. Stupid, stupid rat creature.

So now I regularly trawl eBay for second hand copies. I look in torrent sites to try and find good rips. I’ve got a 12 part collection of Operation Luna but it’s not the same version as I listened to on Radio 4. I think it might be the American editions. The intro’s wrong and there are episode recaps that I have no memory of.

The bottom line for me is; well done BBC and your chosen online retailers. You’ve done yourself out of a good sale because of your distribution choice.