I love symphonies. I love when the entire orchestra sounds at once and sends the audience reeling, like in Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony or in anything by Mahler, and I love when the strings shimmer so delicately that the music seems to be made of spun glass, and I especially love when every person in the concert hall holds his breath after a perfect finale, seconds before the hall explodes into applause.That being said, I have just spent the past 40 minutes listening to the lead singers of various metal bands scream about raping Christians and summoning Satan to eat and drink of said Christians' flesh and blood.

This stems in part from reading Daniel D. Snyder's impassioned descriptions of The Absence and such in his column, Made of Metal. His exuberance is enough to make any nerdy, blond sonata snob want to flash her Metal horns at an Amon Amarth concert. But I blame the majority of those 40 minutes on modern technology.

Along with an explosion of controversy surrounding online album sales' effects on the music industry has come the ability to select exactly which tracks to own with no obligation to the rest of the disc's content. Gone are the days of schlepping to Best Buy to purchase an entire album for the one song that rocks hardest (or doesn't). Thanks to iTunes and its illegal peer-to-peer bastard cousins, that one song is at the tips of anyone's fingers; whether or not that Pavement fan would listen to the rest of the Fergie oeuvre is immaterial as long as he can get hold of "Glamorous."

Why would any self-respecting Pavement enthusiast listen to "Glamorous"? Perhaps it's because there's a hidden rhinestoned nugget of Fergie inside any too-indie-for-thou hipster, just like there's apparently a hairy, growling Viking waving his bloodied broadsword in the depths of my soul. We can lengthen the tethers of these quirks and contradictions with Internet radio like Pandora (an amazing Music Genome Project innovation) or iTunes or certain illegitimate programs that I of course would never, ever condone, satisfying the various facets of our temperaments and personalities with a click of the mouse and, perhaps, 99 cents.

A litany of famous dead people has commented on the nature of music, describing it as the food of love or a window into the soul. The careful selection of songs to fit one's mood has never been so easy; discovering new depravities, delicacies or dimensions inside oneself has never been so fulfilling. You, with the Jay-Z? Try some Cat Power. You, with the Cat Power? Give Hepburn a listen. I'm going to follow up all that Amon Amarth with a few tracks by Raffi.