In this little tutorial, I will show you an example of how stupidly complicated it is to find a song I like. In all seriousness, my tastes in music are fairly obscure - I’ve probably already told you this - so it makes it that much harder to get my hands on the tracks I want. At most, I can buy a pricy album from Amazon. Or, I can download the song from some other online store that I’ve never heard of. Great.

Ready for this? Ok. Here is how I go about finding my music.

  1. Go onto di.fm and find a radio station of the genre I like.
  2. Listen and wait for a particular song that I might want.
  3. If something especially awesome comes up, I look at my media player to see the title of the song.
  4. Dang! It doesn’t actually show the name. The song is really just part of a bigger mix.
  5. Go onto Google and search for the mix with the song in it.
  6. Well, eventually I find out where I can download it on the internet. (But I just want the one song!)
  7. This stupid thing doesn’t even have a track listing. I have a seventy-minute MP3 file of songs and I don’t know the titles of any of them.
  8. Perhaps this thread has what I’m looking for?
  9. Yes, it does. It has a track listing. The song I really want is “Mirage of Hope” by Hemstock & Jennings.
  10. Huh? I can’t even find a friggin’ official website for this artist…
  11. …however, I am able to get some results on Amazon. I would probably want this album.
  12. “Import”? Twenty-seven bucks?! F#@%!
  13. For the record, I don’t even have a credit card or anything like that. (And to think that the album only comes from a different country.)
  14. The file-sharing networks don’t have it. I wonder why I’m not surprised.
  15. I’m not even going to try to find a torrent.

That’s all it takes, folks. My life is so hard.