Many years ago, Internet promised to be an open highway, wherein information would flow freely and which could, eventually, allow human beings to have better understanding of each other.
It took just a couple of years for reality to deny that belief: newspapers eventually started charging for their material, which actually makes sense: journalists have to live out of something. But then, google and other search engines started burying non-commercial material underneath thousands and thousands of pages with a commercial purpose. Google and its peers say that the results retreived after a search engine are the aggregation of millions of clicks: the websites you get are the most popular. In reality, the results are also influenced by your location, age, and other pieces of information your computer gets from you every time you log in the internet. Two people searching for the same term are likely to get different results.
I was thinking about this as I started doing some research for this post. I think Zeibekiko is a really good album and tried to research more about the Nederlands Blazers Ensemble (according to Wikipedia, it's an ensemble of Dutch musicians) All the results I got from google were either sites where you can download Zeibekiko for free, or amazon and pages where you can buy the material. This post will never make it to the top-10 of google, and I guess that's fine: this is just an amateurish blog with no pretentions whatsoever. Also, I guess it's more important for people to actually listen to the music than reading a post about it. However, there is something sad in realizing that, like many times before in human history, commercial interests, will prevail online.
The Greeks knew one thing or two about that...
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