Each year I give away a CD’s worth of music to my friends at the end of the year. Not so much a compilation of the year’s best, it is merely a collection of the music I enjoyed this year regardless of when it was released. Since I give it away at a party the tracks are largely uptempo. This year I tried my hand at mixing the whole shebang into one continuous track using Traktor, a simple program of shocking complexity. I wasn’t completely successful, but the experience did add one more bullet item to my growing list of resolutions for 2005: learn to match beats so as not to create music that sounds like an EKG pinging cardiac arrhythmia. (Full list of resolutions coming soon.)

My pal Len Perez also released a mix for his friends this year — four CD’s to my one — so I thought it interesting to note the overlaps. Granted our tastes are similar, but this very small scale collaborative filtering is still notable given that we receive our musical inputs from different sources.

So, the overlap: Orbital, Sasha, Mr. Projectile. Orbital released their last album this year; Sasha his first (studio album, that is). Mr. Projectile is the one to watch — perhaps the most promising artist of his genre this year.

A while back Bailey’s liqueur was running an ad called “Zero Gravity Bar” wherein neo-retro hipsters float about slurping up weightless Bailey’s globules. I loved it — not so much for the space theme but because of the music. Part Herb Alpert, part Fatboy Slim, it perfectly evoked a future with a loungy past. So, I had to find the tune of course. Googled “Bailey’s Zero Gravity Bar”. Got a few hits at some odd forums that are devoted solely to discussing commercials. Had I stumbled upon these forums in any other circumstance I would certainly have made fun of the people who post to them, but in this case they had what I needed. Or so I thought. The few that mentioned this commercial were fairly certain the track was called “Les Fleurs” by 4Hero. (This was confirmed by Bailey’s website, which I should have gone to in the first place.)

OK great. Checked Apple Music Store. Nothing. Checked the sketchy Russian download sites. Hit! Downloaded for a cool $0.10. Wrong song. Damnit. Turns out there this song applies to the non-US version of the commercial. More Googling. For a few weeks — weeks! not a normal unit of time in Internet search terms — there were no new leads on the song. Then, after finding more chatboards devoted to commercials (the ad-obsessed are a diverse community, I reckon), it was noted that the song was called “Swing It Back” by Avenue A. There was a link to a production company which listed the album as “Never the Less” and had a sound clip. I verified that the clip was the correct song. OK great. So, you’d think that armed with all this info getting the song would be a no-brainer. Back to Apple Music Store. Nope. Sketchy Russian stores. Nyet, nyet. Walmart and company. Hell no. Peer-to-peer. Nothing. Let me tell you: never was a sequence of words less conducive to a Google search — ‘avenue’, ‘a’, swing’, ‘it’, ‘back’, ‘never’, ‘the’, ‘less’. I turned up next to nothing. It was the first time in a long while that I was stymied in online searching. This, of course, was making me want the song all the more. I was becoming willing to pay far more than a dime for this track.

Eventually I tried searching not on the keywords that I had (since they returned junk) but on other words that might be associated with them ‘jazz’, ‘beat’, ‘trumpet’, etc. Actually I always threw ‘avenue’ in there as it was the most unique of the original terms. I came across a wholesale distributor who seemed to carry the album — in Chicago no less. And, for a few hours per week a commoner like myself could walk in and buy something. This is the opposite of online music shopping. It was not cheap, not convenient, and not on-demand. I had to wait for a three-hour window on a Saturday to drive myself to the shop. Of course, the actual space probably was what an online operation looks like: stacks and stacks and stacks of music, organized for inventory purposes not for consumers browsing the aisles. I had my album. Having only heard a short commercial and an online clip, I was now the proud owner of twenty-two dollar’s worth of album. But that’s the thing. I was happy to pay. Maybe I was just glad to relive the experience of hunting for an album like I did when I was younger. (I have fond memories of flipping through cut-out bins in record shops looking for some obscure album.) Maybe I simply recognized that scarcity in a world of online ubiquity drives price way up.

Best of all, the whole album is amazing. “Swing It Back” isn’t even the best track. I highly recommend the album — if you can find it. Or, rather, especially if you can.

UPDATE: I’ve received lots of requests to share this track and/or album. I’m sorry to say that I can’t. I’ve e-mailed the band to see if there is a reissue in the works. Will post any info that I uncover here.