MUSICAL MUSINGS: You know you’re getting old when you just can’t relate to popular music anymore. This week, the best-selling British group Coldplay released a new album called “X and Y”, which has caused quite a stir. I listened to some clips from it on Amazon, and it leaves me cold. I grew up with rock music, and I followed it over the years as it morphed into various forms. But now the music charts are dominated by new influences, including hip-hop and techno-trance. Coldplay’s sounds are arguably a “light-FM” version of the latter school. Ugh. At least the original stuff by Radiohead and their genre had a certain quality to it, even if I couldn’t listen for more than 30 seconds. Coldplay is definitely low-carb music. You get less, and you pay for it. But hey, if that’s what the kids of today want, well, fine. Old fossils like me will retreat back to our caves with our Van Halen and Aerosmith and Pearl Jam and Three Doors Down.

Speaking about music and being old, I recently bought some music downloads from Tunegenie. This was my first venture into the brave new world of protected WMA files. It seemed to go OK, though; I got the files, used my credit card, and managed to open up and play the tunes on Media Player 7.1. So I started looking around at other music download sites, including Walmart, Rhapsody, Yahoo, Napster and MSN. And what I saw truly frightens me. Unless you have broadband, use Internet Explorer with Active X turned on, and manage your music with Media Player 9 or 10, you’re generally shut out of the game (other than Tunegenie, which doesn’t have as big a song collection as the others). Oh, not to mention the “special software” that you have to download for some of these music download sites. (Anytime you have to download and install “special software” to “take advantage of” some wonderful service on the net, think “TROJAN HORSE”).

I’m perfectly happy with my only-on-when-I-say-so dial-up service, with my Firefox browser, and with old Media Player 7.1. I don’t like Player 9 with it’s “let me look at your entire computer” approach to managing media files; it seems like a convenience, but I believe that it’s really Microsoft’s way of policing your music and video collection. Call me paranoid, but I suspect that Media Player will soon (if it doesn’t already) send Internet messages back to Microsoft headquarters without your permission, reporting on what kind of files you have on your computer and whether they might violate copyrights. Then MS can give such info over to the music industry and you will soon get registered letters from lawyers demanding that you explain why there’s an old mp3 on a folder somewhere on your hard drive that perhaps was taken from copyrighted material – and maybe you get sued for big bucks in damages. (As though BMG and Sony and the other music companies aren’t making enough money already.)

With Internet Explorer, Active X, and a broadband hook-up that’s always turned on, it’s all technically feasible. BIG BROTHER IS HERE, and millions of computer users think that it’s just a wonderful way to enjoy music and video entertainment. Hey, I’m perfectly willing to pay for music files; the days of freely available mp3s for most any tune out there were in fact immoral. But what’s going on now as a condition for the right to buy music files at a reasonable price DEFINITELY looks to me like a Trojan horse from BIG BUSINESS. It goes way beyond the licensing protections built into today’s WMA downloads.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t want BMG, Microsoft, Walmart, Yahoo and Sony rummaging around on my hard drive, even though I have nothing illegal there. If that means that I can’t get 99 cent downloads (or 88 cents at Walmart), so be it. Besides, if new music is anything like Coldplay, then who needs it. I’ll stick with my old CD collection and my classic-rock radio stations.

Wake up people. Big business is watching you, 24-7. (As is government with the PatAct; big business and the feds are working together quite closely now.) You are letting them see everything you do on your computer, in return for a zillion songs for your iPod (and the false security that if there is some nut out there planning a terror assault on his computer, the authorities will be able to stop him; if you really want to cause mayhem, you don’t need the Internet). Is it really worth giving up what the founding fathers worked so hard to give our nation, i.e. a bit of freedom and privacy ?????