Paste Samplers

I subscribed to Paste Magazine for about six years during the 2000's. It was a magazine devoted to music and entertainment. It started out as a website in the late 1990's and was a print publication between 2002 and 2010. I had a subscription from 2005 to 2010 and ended when the publication went online only. 

I always enjoyed reading this magazine. It not only covered music with an often indie perspective but they also wrote about movies, television shows, computer/video games, books, comics, comedy, craft beer, politics and more. It was all very entertaining and I looked forward to the new issue each month.

As part of the subscription along with each magazine I received a sampler CD of the music discussed or reviewed in that issue. I would usually give the CD a listen at the time I got it and then it went on the shelf with my CD collection. It was many years before I listened to them again.

Sometime during the height of the pandemic I grabbed a stack of these sampler CDs and brought them downstairs with the intention of giving them a listen. It has been about ten to fifteen years since I heard any of these but somehow that never happened and they sat there on a different shelf for the past couple of years.

A few days ago I took them out to the backyard sunroom and stacked them up next to the stereo and now I have been systematically going through them one by one in chronological order. They are each about 70 minutes long and it has been a lot of fun. I've been sitting out there almost every day for the past few years and I always have music on when I am in there reading or writing. Before bringing them out to the sunroom I took a picture of them on the kitchen table.

About half of the artists on these CDs are mostly unknown to me and there are many songs here from groups that I have added their albums to my collection over the years. I have wondered what made them pick a particular song from a reviewed album to be included on the samplers. I have used quite a few of these artists on various mixes but I often did not pick the same songs from the album that were on these samplers. Perhaps I should make a mix of the sampler songs here that did not make it on my previous mixes.

I found a website called MusicBrainz.org which is an open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public. They had a list of all the Paste Magazine sampler CDs and listings of the songs and artists on them.