yay for iTunes?

In the news: Apple Inc’s iTunes digital media store edged out Best Buy and Target to become the second largest U.S. music retailer, behind Wal Mart. The iTunes store now had more than 50 million customers and has sold more than 4 billion songs. Here is the complete article. Of course, physical CD sales are still going down. Which always makes me sort of laugh, I know we are very small potatoes in the Indie music world, but for us physical CD sales, and especially at shows, are almost all we sell. Guess we’re just behind .

adventures from the road

So we’re playing at Fort Lee Army Base this past weekend – we play for the soldiers there once every three months or so, and it’s always a great experience. Last week was interesting though – to say the least. Our guitarist/singer lost her wallet the day of the show. And you need a driver’s license, or at least a picture ID, to get on a military base. She brought her passport, but mistakenly grabbed the expired one. So at five till seven (concert starts at seven) I get a frantic phone call: she cannot get on base. Our keyboard player is not going to be there that night, and I do NOT play guitar well enough to carry a concert (worship I can handle, concert: not so much). So I beg a sergeant who knows us to intercede on our part, while Greg, our drummer, and myself get going (the soldiers have a limited time they can be at the coffee house, so we cannot wait too long). We scrape through the first two songs, and halfway through song #2 get the thumbs-up sign from the back: Kim and Dan (our bass player) are on their way in. I have seldom been so happy to see band members show up! By the time we took our first break my heartrate is finally down to normal again. All a part of life on the road. 

love

I am officially in love with my new iPhone. 

happy valentine’s day

My hubby and I are pretty big Apple fans. We both switched to Mac laptops a few years ago (I inherited one from a group I used to work with, and he got one via his work) and absolutely love them. Both of us have been drooling over Apple’s iPhone since it was announced in January 2007, and we have been saving money since it was released last June – we skipped giving each other Christmas gifts and birthday gifts, among other things. Our current cell phone contract ran out last week, and today…… our iPhones are arriving! Yay!

wow

I take about 30 minutes each morning to read blogs I try to keep up with. In that process I often discover new blogs to read – which is what just happened. This blog is not music-related, but I decided to post it anyway – written by a Saudi blogger, I was struck by how radical the act of blogging is for him. For me, it is fun, simple, a tool to express myself, perhaps get some more exposure for our band, keep a record of my days. For this blogger, the stakes are much higher.

the social web

Over the course of the past few months I have started to delve more and more into social networking, social bookmarking, social media in general. Sometimes it ends up being a huge black hole for my time (wow. I just spend two hours on Facebook? Doing….. what exactly?) but fortunately that is balanced by helpful, productive, unexpected results as well (finding out a friend’s daughter’s surgery went well through Twitter, being found by friends from my Denver-days on MySpace).

The cool and frustrating thing all at once: there is just so much of it. So many sites. So many profiles to create, keep up with, be creative with. So I am setting some boundaries – limits as to how much time I spent on it each day. We’ll see how successful I am in a few weeks .

common groundz

Do you ever feel like you walk into a place – a restaurant, a store, or in this case, a coffee shop – and you have an instant affinity with it? The weather has been awful here today – pouring down rain pretty much all day, which has made navigating the roads downright treacherous – and instead of heading home in between my lunch meeting and our evening show I decided to stay downtown and work at our evening location - Common Groundz Cafe. I don’t know if it is the downtown feel – it’s adjacent to VCU’s downtown campus – or all the Ikea furniture (I adore Ikea and my home could be one of their showrooms) or the fact they serve all Fair Trade coffee or the fact that the bathroom walls are made of blackboard and there’s a basket full of colorful chalk right there – but I absolutely love this place. And because they have free wireless I know I will be coming back to work here on a regular basis. Tonight we get to play here – opening for our good friend Leslie Dripps and I just hope it clears up enough for people to come out. Because this is one venue that should be packed – just because it is cool on so many levels.