I was just thinking to myself, “Self, why haven’t you heard anything new this year that’s just, like, blown the doors off? On the one hand, it could be the beginning-of-the-year-thing, where nothing great happens in January. The Green Lantern is the number one movie in America, etc. and so forth. But that couldn’t be it all, could it?

“There’s been the Smith Westerns, Ducktails, Tennis—all sorts of execrable-seeming bands that probably make pretty decent music. And there’s that James Blake, who you actually really seem to like all of a sudden.

“But there’s got to be more. Remember, two years ago Merriweather Post Pavillion leaked on Christmas and that was awesome. And last year, I forget, but something cool leaked at the beginning of the year. What gives?”

And then I remembered this resolution I kind of made to myself when I was drunk and it was late at night. I don’t think I’m going to pirate any new music in 2011. And nothing that’s come across my radar this year has seemed worth buying. Nothing has even been worth the opportunity cost of Googling “retro ironic portland band mediafire.”

I mean, sure, I may have recently re-acquired some Beatles remasters ripped to FLAC from 180 gram vinyl, encoded at 96kHz/24bit…

But that’s different?

It might be. It might not be. I just started working on a brief piece about digital downloads, and sure: Pirates, Wikileaks, information wants to be free, “Hackers of the world, unite!” I don’t know.

I’m sure that downloading music is killing music. It’s sort of like how gaining lots of political power tends to wither what undergirds your political aspirations in the first place. Maybe?

This IFPI report could be a bunch of hand waving and “death rattle of a dying business model,” but I think the brats running Pirate Bay/What/Demonid/et al. really are sort of ruining a good thing. I mean, I don’t want to be stuck listening to the Beatles, not because I dislike the Beatles, but because I don’t want the absolute pinnacle of modern pop music to be located somewhere on the precipice of 1969 and 1970. I’d like to think that we can do better, and without actually paying people to be better than the freaking Beatles, no one is going to manage.

So what I’m saying is I really hope there’s a way to pay for a FLAC download of James Blake’s upcoming album, but I may content myself with slogging to the store to buy an actual CD. For the first, and definitely not the last, time this year.