Sunday, April 10, 2011

Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Ron Jones Project

Wow!  Apparently, I'm not alone in feeling that some of Next Gen's best musical scores came from Ron Jones.  As I mentioned in my TNG review last Monday, I discovered Vol. 6 of Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Ron Jones Project when looking up links for "The Icarus Factor" on Amazon.  The fact that it was up to six volumes made me curious about what exactly it was and how many more volumes were out there.  Well, apparently it's only every single music score he made for Star Trek!

The series runs for twelve volumes, covering all the music from Jones's 42 episodes during the shows first four seasons.

And the best part?  You can cherry-pick 'em.  Amazon, iTunes and eMusic all offer each track on all 12 albums as individual downloads. I started out building my own "best of" collection, but I'm discovering the more I hear the more tracks I want to get.  I may wind up with all 12 volumes before I'm done after all.

And I know I'm working against myself here, but I've got to recommend eMusic as the way to go.  eMusic is a monthly subscription service, where you pay a monthly fee and get a certain amount of downloads per month.  They started out doing more independent music, but have gone much more mainstream over the last few years.  The down side (if you're a more casual music listener) is that you are making a monthly commitment; the upside is that it is significantly cheaper.  All the tracks I bought through eMusic cost me $0.49 each as opposed to $0.99 at the other sites; the albums cost $5.99 as opposed to $8.99.  Yeah, yeah, I get a cut from Amazon if you click through using my links and I get nothing from eMusic, but I have to point out the best option when I see it.  I'll never get this monetizing thing right...

So, here's all the links to all the albums.  As I said, in addition to eMusic and Amazon, they're also available on iTunes.  Enjoy!

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