Album Review: Renaissance Digital 01 - Paolo Mojo, as well as some thoughts on the music industry

While scrolling through Itunes, I took notice of an album which I had never noticed before. Renaissance Digital 01 by Paolo Mojo is under the famous Renaissance record label, so I figured Id give it a listen. Paolo Mojo is a world-renown DJ and producer who I am a big fan of. After listening to a few of the track samples, I knew I must have it and luckily for me, I had an Itunes gift card. After careful listening to the album, I noticed that while it is a very good, minimal progressive house album, there were only a few tracks that stood out to me, namely Switch the Lights (Motorcitysoul Remix) by Fuckaponydelic and I’ll Lick Your Spine (Repeat Repeat Remix) by Let’s Go Outside. These two tracks mark the end of the chill “I’m dancing inside my head” to “this track is making me want to lose my shit”. All the tracks aside, it is the concept of this album that caught my attention. After doing some research, I realized that not only could I not purchase this album from Amazon, I could not purchase this CD on the Internet period. It turns out that Renaissance and Apple teamed up and had this album created with the intention of having it only available through Itunes and a few other select sources. It makes all the more sense that this album is titled Digital 01 because that is exactly what this was, a digital album. If you are a fan of his, or if you are a fan of minimal progressive house or good dance music in general, you should definitely check this album out. Check Paolo out at his MySpace Page

I got to thinking. What is to stop other artists from doing what Renaissance and Paolo Mojo did and start releasing more musical content that is only available digitally through Napster, Rhapsody, or Itunes. While I believe that as long as there are record labels, there will always be CDs and LPs, but I do believe that the popularity of the two, mainly CDs, is starting to slowly decay. As more and more younger generations are growing up and becoming introduced to the Internet, it will be harder and harder for these labels to push CDs on these kids when they have millions of albums at their disposal online.

The concept of selling an album exclusively through the Internet is not a new concept by any stretch of the imagination. Most famously, Radiohead released their most recent album, In Rainbows, on their website weeks before it was to be released in stores. The beauty of it was that it took the record label out of the equation and enabled buyers to name their own price. Whether you wanted to pay $100 or $.01, it did not matter to the band. The goal of this idea was not to see how much money they could make but rather to enable their fans to get closer than ever to them as artists and to experience what it was that they were trying to share. I feel like that is being lost these days with a lot of musical acts. They become too enveloped in the idea of “let’s make tons and tons of money” and not “let’s give our fans a say and give them something that we think that they would like”. I blame a lot of that on the modern music industry, whose motto is “what have you done for me lately”. To them, they couldn’t care less if the band is making good music; all that is important to them is what will make them the most money. I won’t say that money isn’t important because it is. Being a musician is still a job, and in the state that our economy is in, making money has become even more important. What I think is being lost in all this is a lack of any major record label tat gives the artists an opportunity to express themselves and make music that speaks to them. There needs to be a record label that says, “eh, while I may not be making as much money as Warner Bros. or Colombia, I am much more happy making music that my artists and myself can enjoy”. You could say that there needs to be a haven for all these artists to come together and change the traditional ways of music…