Tonight the Dove Awards are being presented in Nashville. Do you know what the Dove Awards are? If you do, I

My real

I am an old man. Last night my wife and I went to a concert. The opening band played loud, hardrock, praise music. They sucked. Especially since they only played the current most popular praise songs, and played them poorly. Wife and I sat on the floor in the back of the concert, resting our heads on our jackets and talking about our days, completely ignoring the hardrock worship. We weren’t there for the opening band anyway. In high school I would have been in the midst of the crowd with my hands in the air.

When the main act finally started, we stood up to watch the show, and I realized we were standing well apart from the main crowd of people near a group of middle-aged parents who were dancing. Their children were no where to be seen, most likely death by embarrassment, a mercy killing.

I hung my head and realized I’m 21 years old and married. I am completely uncool.

The most difficult thing about getting married is consolidating your music collections. Two different people with different tastes and different ways of organizing these massive collections of music. And once you get married you’re not allowed to have a shoe box full of CDs anymore. It’s some kind of household decorating rule that you must have some high dollar CD rack or drawer or system. It’s really a pain in the butt. I’m a big advocate of no more CDs, tapes, or records. I think the digital age should take us into a new realm where we don’t have to worry about jewel cases and scratched CDs and liner notes. Just put all the music on a harddrive and pipe it through my stereo, my walkman, my car stereo. Then I wouldn’t have re-alphabetize the whole collection. Life could be so much simpler.

There are close to one hundred CDs sitting on my coffee table that I haven’t listened to in several years. That much ignored artistry has made me realize several things: 1) Teenagers shouldn’t be allowed to buy a used car worth of CDs they won’t like in five years. 2) Musicians shouldn’t be allowed to sell CDs that no will appreciate in five years. Not only is it a waste of money, but it’s an embarrassment to everyone involved when your award winning album sells for thirty-five cents on e-bay. 3) It’s time for a home stereo revolution. No more buying albums with one hit single and nine songs you’d rather forget. No more piles of CDs to gather dust on the bookshelf. No more boxes of CDs in the basement you wish you could get rid of, but you can’t because you never know when you’ll get the itch to hear Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” No more embarrassment when your friends come over and see what’s really in your CD collection (especially true for those into “Christian Rock”).

I’m probably giving away an idea worthy of a dot-com and a few million startup dollars, but I think somebody needs to take mp3 technology and start a home stereo revolution. I’m not talking about a computer-geek-in-the-basement revolution. I’m talking about the real thing. Somebody needs to make mp3 jukeboxes. Some kind of server that houses thousands upon thousands of mp3s. Instead of buying a CD, you buy the mp3s that get added to your personal jukebox. You could even share the mp3s among your household. You could keep every song you’ve ever owned, and you wouldn’t have to worry about the aging CD taking up precious shelf space.

Just think of the possibilities. No more cracked jewel cases. No more scratched CDs. No more lost CDs. No more reorganizing your alphabetized collection because you bought the newest Abba hits collection. We could cut back on all that wasted packaging and albums would cost half as much. We could even cut back on all those wasted songs and only buy the radio single you wanted in the first place. Think of all the plastic we’d save! We could even cut out the record companies and buy your mp3s straight from the band (whoa there tiger, you just shut that idea down. Okay, okay, we can keep the record companies. Somebody has to… um… do the marketing.)

It’s shear brilliance. Somebody should be paying me for this idea. Are there even any drawbacks? I suppose if you’re a musical connoisseur you wouldn’t be getting the liner notes. Yeah, sometimes they’re fun to look at, but we could strike a compromise. You could get the liner notes for an extra 50 cents. I suppose this plan might put album cover designers out of business, but we could figure something out. Maybe the new jukebox server would come with a monitor to help you select your album. The cover could be an image on the screen, and the designers could keep their cushy jobs. I’m telling you, this plan is ingenious.

Now somebody implement it really quick so I can solve my music collection crisis.

What does radio have to do with Napster? This whole Napster controversy has been going on with the record companies suing Napster and millions of pirating web surfers complaining about their rights. Yet no one is talking about radio stations. I’ve been realizing lately that the mainstream radio stations are glorified extensions of record companies. They play exactly what the record companies want, when they want it. A band only has one hit single at a time. Why? The record company releases one single at a time. That way the album receives more airplay because more songs are on for a longer period. You get the public hooked on one song until they’re sick of it. Then you pick a new song and get ’em hooked on that one. You keep doing it until you’ve exhausted the worthwhile songs on the album, and by that time the band has released a new CD. They also hate those number one singles.

But what does that have to do with Napster? Well, millions of people have been downloading the songs they want for free. Apparently they’re too cheap to buy CDs and they’re not satisfied with the variety on the radio. Shouldn’t radio stations be trying to cash in on this some how? Radio stations deliver songs to the public for free. They don’t worry about any kind of copyright infringement. But no, the radio stations keep a tight grip on their 50 song play list and rarely depart from it. It’s really fun to listen to multiple stations and watch as each station realizes a new song’s going to be a hit. First one stations starts playing it a few times. When they start to overplay it another station picks it up and plays it occasionally. Then a third station picks it up and pretty soon everyone is overplaying the song and it’s featured on the end cap at Target. Too bad most of us were sick of the song a month ago.

It just seems like someone in the radio industry should wise up and discover a way to tap into all this technological wizardry and unappeased audiences.

Of course I haven’t thought of how to do it yet. I’ll save that for another past-midnight evening.

What’s it like to be a no name band traveling across the country playing hole in the wall clubs with reject Salvation Army furniture? It’s a plywood floor and the brick walls and exposed pipes make it look like the walled in the alley. The punk kids pour in, spikes, chains, colored hair. I can’t help but wonder if this is the cutting edge of the music scene, or just a hole in the wall. Cigarette smoke lingers, adding an interesting contradiction to the words from the stage about this Jesus. The lead singer has the look of a rock star. You think he does it on purpose. His skateboard shoes, tattered jeans, and old Cincinnati Reds T-shirt. His hair hangs down past his chin in tangles. But it’s not on purpose so much as it’s the life on the road. It’s not fashion so much as necessity.