good afternoon gremmies. stevie wonder’s “Living for the City” is coming out of my speakers in a way that can only be described as “blasting”. like dynamite. or – some might say – a gremmie outta control. we’ve added the 2002 year to the site for your approval.
some of you have emailed goof and gremmie asking, “what happens when all of the music is uploaded to the basement and the dot net? where do you go from there?” it’s a fair question and an inevitability. in due time, we’ll have the full library available and have nothing left to upload beyond new Pearl Jam material. from our perspective however, this is the launch point to add original value to the site. at the moment, in the entirety of gremmie.net, we’ve primarily acted as librarians to expansive volumes of Pearl Jam material (gremmie’s basement and gremmie.net’s b-sides) while also providing gremmies with our discretionary choices of the “best of” versions of live songs (gremmie.net’s signature live series). once there’s no room left to dig, goof and gremmie will finally be able to focus on adding bells, whistles, and most importantly original material you can’t find anywhere else. for example we plan to add a robust media player that will allow gremmies to play gremmie.net tunes in a reliable and seamless fashion. this will act as a revised version of the now defunct “gremmie radio”. also, we plan to write more op-ed articles regarding Pearl Jam (like this) vis-a-vis the excellent work of TwoFeetThick.
we’ll let you folks in on a little secret: the music you find on gremmie.net is a commodity and we do not have the market cornered. as if to say, we don’t have a monopoly on Pearl Jam’s music across the interwebs. goof and gremmie didn’t invent the concept of aggregating Pearl Jam’s catalog into one site. people have done it before, time and time again. we noticed early on that these site didn’t recognize that the music was just a commodity. there’s a larger discussion here as to why these sites didn’t recognize this which follows the technological arc of the early internet, the availability of media in an easily digestible form, and the advent of blogs. but to boil it down – Pearl Jam’s catalog of music is a commodity; a widely available, inexpensive commodity.
while people love and adore that commodity (goof and gremmie included), there’s no magic in bringing it all together. this is why sites like TwoFeetThick and the now retired Five Horizons are the most highly regarded Pearl Jam sites on the internet. they focus not only on the music but on the whirling dervish surrounding the music. any gremmie can upload material for people to download, but the real sweet, hard candy is in creating original content around the music us gremmies have such a fondness for.
up next: 2006.