..... As it happens, my colleague ended up buying "Partie Traumatic," Black Kids' debut CD, on iTunes. He doesn't really read music criticism, so he didn't know -- and wouldn't have cared -- that Rolling Stone and The Guardian loved the record or that Pitchfork hated it. He just really liked the Black Kids song we heard over dinner ("I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You"), got hooked and became a customer.

All of that got me thinking about the economics of music discovery, whether by hearing new music in a restaurant, in a movie theater or on the internet. Speaking of which, the deeply troubled music industry, rather astonishingly, has been spending its summer making it harder for music fans to encounter new music online. Last month, for instance, Muxtape, which I raved about in this column when it launched earlier this year, went dark. Created by former college-radio DJ Justin Ouellette, the hipster favorite made it simple for music fans to create virtual mix tapes

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But now, a simple, sad message appears on the Muxtape home page: "Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA" -- the Recording Industry Association of America. A brief period? We'll see.

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