Your Daily Question: Best Expenditure of Money?
About a week ago, I bought the soundtrack to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. iTunes informs me that I have listened to it thirty times since then.
My wife’s getting weary of the emo re-envisioning of our seventh President, but every time I play it, I think: it’s getting cheaper. I paid ten bucks for it on iTunes, and with thirty repetitions my cost-per-listen is down to thirty-three cents a song. Heck, if you count the individual songs, I’m down to two cents per playing.
Compare this to my media waste of $9.99 for Cat Stevens’ latest album, which I think I listened to twice. At best. Or, worse, the DVD for Charlie Wilson’s War, which I paid $5 for and haven’t even taken it out of the packaging.
Judged on a cost-per-listening basis, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is a great bargain! In time, I’ll get the cost of that whole thing down to a thin dime per playing. That’s so much better than videogames I’ve paid $60 for and barely played. I paid little, I maximized my experience.
So I wonder: on a cost-per-listening basis, what is my best media bargain? What have I paid the least for, and listened/watched/played the most?
My first instinct was to say “Rock Band!” because I have probably spent literally a month solid playing that over the years – but then you consider all the plastic instruments and bonus tracks I’ve purchased, and suddenly Rock Band is a hobby that probably costs me $1 every time I step up to play it – worthwhile, certainly, but no bargain. Likewise, I’ve seen Star Wars at least a hundred times, but fifty of those were in the theater, and the rest of the showings were split between three separate DVD/VHS releases – again, satisfying, but pricey.
Queuing iTunes, I see my most-played track (70 times) is Fountains of Wayne’s “Stacey’s Mom,” and I know for a fact my “most listened-to album” on iTunes oscillates between their “Welcome Interstate Managers” (a pure pop gem) and the soundtrack to Avenue Q (foul and surprisingly clever). So is that my best media bargain?
Well, in modern terms, yes. But back in the day, I paid $3.99 for a cassette tape of Def Leppard’s “Pyromania,” which as a teenager I listened to constantly, constantly, to the point where that music is engraved in my marrow. That was the first album I identified with as me, and cassette tapes lasted a long damn time, so I think that price is probably somewhere in the range of half-a-cent per playing. That’s my best media bargain. (That, or George Carlin’s “Class Clown” on cassette. Or, possibly, “Red Dwarf,” which I used to play every night in lonely houses to give myself some noise to drift off to sleep to.)
So. With this in mind, I ask: What is your greatest media bargain? What did you pay low and utilize the most?
(And if the answer is “I Bittorrented it,” well, good for your cheapness, bad for actually recompensing the people who helped make the thing you love. So we’ll leave out the illegal merchandise for now. Though technically, things like Radioheads’ maybe-free albums do muddy the mix…)