I don't have much desire to go to big festival shows these days, I'm much more into smaller, more intimate venues where the musicians (and drinks) are close. But seeing Prince cover Radiohead at Coachella would have been cool. And there's always something to be said for laser light shows.
This saturday, April 19, 2008, is Record Store Day. Go support your independent record store this saturday, and any day you can. Small record store are cool. They usually have well selected collections of music - you can feel a bit better picking out random stuff, knowing it at least meets some level of quality. And you can be sure the staff, surly though they me be, knows their music.
I'm buying more music electronically, but I'm still somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that as time and technology progresses, my music 'format' gets progressively lesser quality - CDs are good but still a compromise due to the storage limits of the medium when it was developed, and MP3/AAC files are compressed, although maybe soon uncompressed FLAC files will be more widely available. I pick up CDs whenever I can (sadly, not too many records these days, although I hope to get another turntable soon!) so that I can at least have an uncompressed source to go back to. Seems like more small record stores are getting into the electronic downloads game - they'll probably have to to really survive.
Take this awareness test. It's good. It's short. It's better with sound - there's voice narration, but it's not loud or crazy or anything.