But here's what I think: there is no new business model for music. It doesn't matter whether you fight the new technology or embrace it or try to appease it; there's no new business model for music because there was never really an old business model for music, either. There was a business model for record companies once, maybe, and there are new ones for celebrity persona-management and soundtrack-placement or something, but these are not business models for music. They are not models for how any particular person who makes music can afford to not hold other employment, and they are not models for how any particular person who loves music can express that love as effective economic catalyst or responsive reward. There is no economic system for maximizing expressive opportunity or artistic greatness. There are not even really business systems for expressive subsistence or artistic sufficiency. Mostly we have music because we are human, and one of the things humans do is sing. Periodically we hold lotteries you enter by singing, like we sometimes hold lotteries you enter by playing basketball or by lying to people en masse. But these are not businesses. Or, more accurately, they are precisely businesses, but businesses for selling dreams, and for selling tools for dreaming, and for selling memorabilia from having once dreamed.

And yet, I still managed to pay for a fair amount of music this year. Perversely, pyrrhically, I still did a bunch of this by purchasing plastic disks. I've been saying for a while that I was still buying CDs out of a rueful love for a doomed system, but I've finally realized that this isn't even true. Honestly, the CD and LP and record-store businesses were never my friends. As a music lover I have always been driven by relentless, nearly-painful curiosity, and no version of the music business has ever tried in earnest to help me be happier. They have demanded too much money, and at the wrong points in the cycle of discovery. They have not helped me learn or explore. Often they've resisted. Not very effectively, in the end, but a weak enemy is not quite the same as a friend.

But what business was too myopic to try, technology and people have made for ourselves. We can explore now. There are only three things mentioned anywhere below that I paid for before hearing, and in all three cases this was due to inattention on my part, not any kind of moral principle or logistical necessity. The systems for music discovery have abundant remaining opportunity for improvement, both technically and culturally, but for the first time in my own life, and maybe ever, they make a basic structural sense. I can follow paths of connections and associations, some made by the music itself and most by its listeners. I can explore the space of possible music directly, not at some qualitatively awkward remove. It's not nearly as easy or efficient, in absolute terms, as it needs to be for the universal benefit of music-loving humans, but for computer-geeks with fast internet connections, at least, it's workable enough.

But though I've always wanted exploration to be free, mostly because charging for it always made it more difficult for both listeners and performers, I've also always wanted to spend money on music. Our economic systems are so obfuscated by now that this simple idea probably sounds malformed or psychotic in that phrasing, but that's exactly what I mean to say: I always have, and still do, want to spend money on music. I want part of the flow of monetary compensation that comes to me, as a result of things I'm good at, to go to the people who make music I love. I download, listen, discard, download, listen, discard, download, listen, listen, discard, download, listen, listen, listen, embrace. And then I want, at the point when I have realized what I love, to have a monetary way to express my appreciation for it. And I want, honestly and specifically, for that expression of appreciation to itself have some coherent additional reward (so simply paying to redownload the same music I already downloaded isn't it), but not an imposition of burden in either direction (so no True Fan subscriptions).

Hilariously, buying CDs is actually a nearly perfect mechanism for the exchange of appreciation and acknowledgment I'm after. Here on what still seems like the brink of the death of the CD, we've finally figured out what a CD is best as: a physical sigil disguised as media. It has practical value as a data backup, aesthetic value as an artistic codicil, collector's value as a commemorative, and economic value as an excuse for a transaction, yet it doesn't force either me or the band into taking on another ongoing relationship to be managed. Belle points out that these physical sigils do also have a non-zero physical storage cost, in the finite space of our house, but I think the incremental space consumed by individual cases is basically reasonable, whether my personal accumulation of them is reasonable or not. And yes, the CDs should cost a little less, and a lot more of that reduced cost should go to the artists. And this still won't constitute a livelihood for any significant fraction of the people who might rather make music than whatever other day job they keep. But that part is just life. I'd rather listen to music for a living (or collect it, for that matter). We're not after riches for idleness, at least not yet. If global economic collapse resets everybody's expectations to sustainable levels, it will have been more than worth all its imaginary "losses". All we're really after, I think, given the current overall balance between human resources and human challenges, is a system for defraying, a little, what it costs people to share their singing. A little more time for singing, a little more time for listening, a little clearer air to carry the music farther.

My wife loves dancing, too, but she's taller. Her nature is also good, but experience has demonstrated that she is, when provoked by metal (or at the other extreme by over-fluffy pop), flappable. For our best family dance parties with all three of us in attendance, we need other music. Bethany and I actually met talking about music, so there's ample precedent for this, and we have a fairly large area of basically overlapping taste. But we both have strong, quick, sub-rational (or is it super-rational?) reactions to things, so finding points of overlap is trickier than just finding areas. She made me a mix for my birthday, though, and my favorite song on it I liked so much I put three songs from that album on my mix for her on her birthday, and so Frightened Rabbit became our shared band of the year, and "Head Rolls Off" probably our most-played family dance song.

And although I made two separate lists again because I don't think interleaving the modes really helps anything, when I had to file a single critics-poll ballot, this was my #1. If metal is about magnifying emotions by projecting them, onto myth or imagination, then these tiny, fragile Frightened Rabbit songs, some of them beyond fragile to broken-and-taped-together, turn around and look through a magnifying glass at the cracks in their most mundane reality. Most of them are nominally breakup songs, some about breaking up with people and some about breaking up with ideas, but this is a lyrical genre, not a defeat, and done right, breakup songs are always about what you find in what you're left with. Life-affirming songs are often, and maybe necessarily, tinged with sadness. If they aren't, it's probably not life they're affirming. So these suspended moments of confusion and loss belong to the same emotional core, to me, as Tanya Donelly's buoyantly resolute "Keeping You", B and my marriage theme-song, and "Head Rolls Off"'s "While I'm alive, I'll make tiny changes on Earth" could go on our new family crest. The other way to deal with the resistance of the air is to just draw your listeners closer, and Frightened Rabbit may be the third vertex, with Low and Tori Amos, of a quiet triangle of intimacy I didn't know until now I was waiting to complete.

I like to think that it was my iTunes purchase of the album, which at the time had no reviews or "Listeners Also Bought" links or mixes, that nudged it in the direction of whatever "editors" subsequently endorsed it, but really I feel more surprised than responsible. Puressence is one of those bands that used to feel like almost the rule in my life, music from somewhere else that nobody near me has ever heard of, which thus seems to exist solely for my own solipsistic transport. The Chameleons were like that, and the Lucy Show, and perhaps most definitively the Comsat Angels; and later, Whipping Boy and Ultrasound and Geneva: bands making dense, reticent, atmospheric anthems with internal catharses you have to find your way into rather than the kind on the radio here that you have to avoid being trampled by.