Stranger Day's "Graves" available free online

Last week I reviewed Charlotte-based rapper Shane Coble aka Stranger Day's new album "Graves," which featured several Charlotte musicians from varied musical genres. It's a great representation of what's going on here and I wanted to let folks know that the album is available as a free download at Stranger Day's website here.

The record features Elevator Jay, Lotta, Ally Hoffmann, Terrence Richard from Junior Astronomers, Alex Kastanas, Mr. Invisible's Justin Aswell, Jams F. Kennedy, Reese, Little Bull Lee and others. And if you read the review and were curious you can satisfy your curiosity with little effort. You can also buy it straight from iTunes if you want. I'm sure he'd appreciate it.

I feel like there's this perception that if something is free then that changes its value. People may think it might not be good (at least that's what I tell my husband when he and his band mates practically give away their own merch). But in this case free of charge doesn't mean worth less. You can hear how much work went into this album and given that Stranger Day is an underground artist he's giving it away to help spread the word.

This got me to wondering if the future generation (or possibly young people now) will expect artistic work to be free - books, music, visual art. So much of it is available at our fingertips. On the flipside, ticket prices to concerts, movies, stand-up, and other types of live entertainment are rising. So maybe live entertainment is where future consumers will find value and spend their dollars (of course there is always the ever-expensive vinyl - that's another blog too). This is all to be explored in another blog somewhere in the future, but it got me thinking much in the same way "Graves" did.