The waiter seating us at Chilis looked at me quizzically.

'Hey, what happened to the (music) store?'

Sonica? Closed it. Went broke. (Nice to be recognized though. I still run into former customers occasionally).

'When did that happen?'

It was almost exactly a year ago.

'I went there to buy some ESP strings last week and it was gone. Now it's a Chinese store selling crafts and furniture and stuff. Had to go to Guitar Center.'

Sigh... That's Castro Street. I was perhaps the wrong ethnicity to survive there.

So I know you change your strings less than once a year and don't buy anything else at music stores. That's one of the reasons why the store didn't make it. But really - you went twenty miles to buy a $5 set of strings(?). Probably spent $5 on gas. Starving Musician is right there(!) - about 500 yards from where we are standing, and I'm pretty sure that they've got ESP's. Haight-Ashbury (the largest Sunnyvale music store) is about a mile that direction and they've also got ESP's.

Oh well. Whatever. It's long gone now, the memories starting to fade. Can't look back. 

It's sometimes amazing the kinds of things that the brain works on after the lights go out ...although I'm certain that the alcohol had some non-trivial effect. This dream lasted the entire night. My sub-conscious was diligently working out how to play all the intricate harmonies to the Beach Boys' "'Til Her Daddy Takes The T-Bird Away" --- on a grand piano.

By the time daylight struck, it was really rockin'. 

The order was ready at the fast food counter. The girl leaned into the microphone. 

Number 9!

(no perception of activity in the nearby region...).

Number 9?

Number 9!!!!

Number 9.

Number 9!?!

By this point I was howling in laughter.  She was probably not more than sixteen years old. Gave me a quizzical look as if to say 'I don't get it. What's so funny?'. Which is precisely why I was rolling on the floor. ...Because she didn't get it. Didn't have a clue.  

I'm probably going to be asked to explain this but I won't. Those of you who understand will likewise find it amusing. Those that are clueless will have to remain that way. 

All of this noise over DRM and copy protection. It should be called what it really is - profit protection. The good news is that eventually it's all gonna' die. The bad news is that a dying business behemoth can still do a lot of damage.

Why am I so sure it's gonna' die? Numbers my friend. Sheer numbers. I loaded up my MP3 player last night with about two months of music. You've probably never heard any of these songs before - yet they all have good qualities. There are thousands more where they came from. I would be so bold as to state that it is now entirely possible to listen to a different musical work every single waking minute of your life, and never hear the same song twice. This certainly isn't good for the music business - which is all about making you play stuff over and over until you wanna' puke.

With YouTube (oops I meant Google Video) we're about to see the same explosion in video media. Maybe this has happened already. Then it will be entirely possible to sit in front of a TV set forever and never see the same thing twice.

The interesting part is that you can do this today without ever touching any of the sacred media which the labels are fighting so hard to protect. Do they have the best content? Who cares? It no longer matters. New content is coming online much faster than you can digest the old content. It's essentially an infinite content stream. All the labels can do is increase this to infinity + n; where n is some absurdly large number. There isn't enough time in your life to take it all in.