Time Convinced Me To Buy Google Music All Access

Google owns everything. Well, almost everything. They don't own Friskies Cat Food and that's one of our Maximum Leader's favorites, so there's that. Anyway, they own a whole bunch of things, the rights to about a zillion songs included. As I'm sure almost all of you know, they now offer this through Google Music via their All Access service. It can be yours for $9.99 per month.

Over the decades, I've collected a substantial library of albums and I figured that with my music and Pandora, I had the situation pretty well in hand. Being a developing fogey and curmudgeon, I'm not interested in new music, so I didn't think All Access would be very tempting. Still, wanting to keep up with the young people*, I gave it a listen with a free month's trial membership. At first, I sat smugly convinced that I would never shell out cash for such a ludicrous service. How much music can you listen to, anyway? I figured I'd be able to buy the CDs I wanted to fill out my music collection for less than I'd pay in a year or so for All Access.

And then I bopped over to the Electric Light Orchestra albums on All Access and listened to Time.

When I was one of the young people, I was a huge ELO fan. I saw them on their Time tour and loved it, even though chances are good some of the show was lip-synched. (Their music was just too heavily layered to perform some of it live.) I'd owned all of ELO in vinyl, but had never replicated that collection on CD. That's when the real beauty of All Access occurred to me. Exploration.

From ELO, I cruised over to The Pointer Sisters' Breakout and from there to The Best Of Katrina and the Waves. All of the sudden I saw that I could dabble, play and experiment. When I first toyed with All Access, I quickly found my new loves, George Formby and Helen Kane and created playlists of my favorites. At the time, I still thought I would buy those CDs and get off All Access after my free month. Not any more. Now I get it.

Anything you want, any time you want. I'm hooked.

Now if we could only get Google to broadcast EPL games.

* - You know you're out of touch when you start using the phrase, "young people." I hate it. The phrase, not the young people. I like young people, myself. They're delicious if cooked just right.