A quick throwback to the original conception of this blog as a repository for genuinely free music (you know, like it was before this happened) while I finish up a review of Napster and compose the second chapter of Nine Nights in Azeroth.
Brian Eno characterizing recorded music as whale blubber may be an attractively unflattering comparison to further lash the beleaguered music industry, but things like Dewey Music serve to remind me that it doesn't go too far as an analogy. If I had whale blubber on tap like I've got recorded music I would heat my fucking house with it. I would be out in the garage trying to cook up whale diesel.
Dewey Music is an interface for Archive.org's public domain music library. It is a noble endeavor, and I'm sure this library is a great resource for some people (remixers, music historians and serious fans of the Grateful Dead spring to mind). But wow, how well it highlights the curious problems of super-abundance.
I. The Genre Problem
There is a genre continuum. It starts with "too generic." Rock and Pop and Hip Hop are very nearly useless categories, particularly if you're just looking for something you'd enjoy listening to and you're a sufficiently broad-minded person that you'd be up for listening to something that could easily hail from any of those categories. Yet it is apparently de rigueur that they be the starting place for browsing music catalogs online.
On the far end of the continuum is Dewey Music. The genre list there is so huge and absurd that it might actually be some sort of statement. The first five genres provided are -n, 00s, 0742 Sound, 1 and 100. There is also a genre for Rock. Not to Mention Rock And Roll, Rock Out, Rock-pop, Rockin, Rock N Roll and something listed as rock jazz punk funk virtuoso karl evans grant sharkey jay havelock southampton england uk live show bass drums primus zappa ben folds five tool live music archive funny comedy bill hicks doug stanhope which bears a single listing under the artist name "toupe" with the track listing "Feliz Cumpleanos," but doesn't actually link to any file. I believe we call this organizational methodology "crowdsourcing."
In my first attempt at browsing I opted for the genre "Van Damme" which led me to a single track under "Collected Works of Frank Harris," a very scratchy vinyl (or for all I know shellac '78 or celluloid cylinder) rip of the frequently covered '20s novelty song "(Oy That, Oy That) Yiddishe Charleston".
Okay.
II. Free isn't free. It isn't even cheap.
I'm going to review the latest incarnation of Napster branding shortly and I'll tell you up front it is not going to be a glowing review. But if I only had two options to supply all my musical consumption from I would choose handing Best Buy sixty bucks a year for unlimited streaming and 60 pathetic downloads from Napster over unlimited listening and downloading for free from Archive.org in a heartbeat.
Because here's the thing: it takes me about 12 minutes to earn five dollars. Music discovery has a definite but strictly limited and defined place in my music listening budget (and by this I mostly mean my time budget). My tolerance for lightly filtered streams of random music gets exhausted quickly. If I'm not happy with what I'm listening to and have to expend effort to listen to something else I soon come to feel that I am paying for the experience in a way I find substantially more noisome than parting with money.
Given its source and intent calling out Dewey Music on these issues is pretty unfair but it does illustrate the point so well. And it is on these rocks that ninety percent (to be generously optimistic) of the radio-slash-record store alternatives trying to make a go of it out there will founder within a few short years.
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