My sweetie and I both woke up with Christmas songs stuck in our heads. For me, the song was “Toy Jackpot” by Blackalicious, with its super-catchy chorus “Is it time yet? Is it time? I can’t wait” in a smooth hip-hoppish vibe. My sweetie emerged from slumber with “10,000 Watts” by Crystal Antlers, a high-energy song about Christmas lights, made to be turned up loud.
Now I have “10,000 Watts” in my head, too.
While very different in sound, these songs have two things in common: They are both really cool, and they both came from Target. In fact, you’ve probably heard parts of the songs already, along with a bunch of others, in Target ads. It was after watching an ad with a song called “You’ll Never Find My Christmas” that the light of my life encouraged me to go in search of the original music to download.
Well, what do you know? There’s a whole Christmas album for download for free at Target.com, and there’s not a dud in the bunch. Target found a bunch of different up-and-coming bands and gave them a great opportunity, and got themselves some fun advertisements built around the music at the same time. To me, this seems like exploitation done right.
For the Ebenezer Scrooges among you: Yes, Target is a big, giant retail corporation, and I’ve just become a shill for them. Lighten up, would you? It’s Christmas! These are good songs you wouldn’t get to hear otherwise!
So hop on over and give a listen — you just might find your new holiday favorite.
Yes, Target is a big giant retail corporation, but there is evidence that they are at least trying to use their power for good. I volunteered a couple of times when Mervyn’s used to sponsor a back-to-school event with the Salvation Army for kids in need. The kids were each given $100 store credit, an adult escort, and free run of the store before normal business hours. When Mervyn’s went out of business, Target stepped in and took over sponsoring that event. And now they’re giving us cool free Christmas music. So, yeah. Go Target.
Still working on the finer points of making the download play nice with my iTunes … it wants to play the tracks alphabetically by artist rather than by track numbers on the album, and the usual sorting clicks aren’t working.
Funny you should mention Mervyn’s … a few years back I picked up a Christmas music CD whose label called it the Whataburger Christmas album, but the online CDDB identified it as coming from Mervyn’s when I copied it into my iTunes album. That one also had a lot of cool tracks on it, although it was more traditional than the Target album.
Huh – I didn’t have that trouble. You can edit the info for the songs and set the track number, but when I imported it was already set correctly. Maybe we have different import preferences or something, though I’ve haven’t fiddled with them (as far as I remember).
I know Gerald has reset some things on the iTunes on this computer. Not that it matters hugely, since I have my holiday tunes set to shuffle play anyway. It means some interesting combinations, like Spyro Gyra followed immediately by the Boston Camerata, followed by “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”
What version of iTunes do you have?
10.1.1 – I don’t pay much attention, but I think it’s updated since I downloaded the tracks. Something updated anyway.