When I first visited Jim Noir, via his My Space site some five years ago, he was plugging away, gigging along and getting a nice word of mouth going. Now, in 2011 it's all paid off or at least paying off handsomely. A couple of his songs have hit anthem status for Adidas which, as any musician will tell you is paydirt for hard dues - and even though there's that shameless commercialization of ones art form looming overhead, the fact that it enables said artist to eat, pay bills and leave ones mind free to create, free of that nagging stomach-churning anxiety over where the next check is going to come from, is fucking wonderful.

So now we come up on something relatively new, and this is the part I really like. In the last couple of years Noir, and his team have come up with an idea and a marketing concept that's being adopted around the music world. I heard about it a few years ago via Kristen Hirsch and it seems to be catching on.

The concept is creating a subscription where you as the audience pay a small amount of money each month and in turn get releases for free as downloads. As far as I can gather, it works out to around $50.00 a year and you get a pile of goodies in return, and you get to support an artist whose work you really like. I'm not saying everybody is going to jump into this. Fifty bucks may be a bit steep for some people. But the idea of being to support an artist this way on an ongoing basis is really appealing and I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about it in the future. At any rate, check out his site and get filled in on the details. In the era of dying majors, it's good to know the wheels of invention are still turning.

So tonight, here's one of the tracks of his latest ep, issued in August and still available as a download via subscription. The Cheese Of Jims Command is one of the many reasons I really like this guy and think the world is in a better place because of him.

To get your mind blown for $50.00 a year is something of a bargain, when you consider the alternatives. Just sayin'.