The loss of physical media: literal and figurative

True story: I was running late the other day, trying to get out of the house with my three-year-old son in tow. Somewhere out on the road I realized I didn't have the CD wallet we keep in the car. I was pretty sure I'd brought it out with me from the house and I had a bad feeling I knew exactly where I'd last seen it: sitting on the roof of the car where I'd set it before rushing back to the house to pick up some forgotten item.

By the time I was somewhere where I could safely pull over and take a look it was predictably gone. Its recovery now is beyond a long shot, I have to assume all those CDs, almost 30, are gone. In many cases I don't even have a back-up - I've been lazy about ripping new stuff to iTunes and of the newest CDs tend to get into the car rotation.

As financial losses go it's on par with a medium car repair or perhaps some dental work - the sort of thing that happens pretty regularly, in other words, though I'm finding myself considerably more irked by this somehow. Maybe because replacing what was lost is going to involve considerable work. Going through all the empty cases, figuring what I've got a copy ripped to iTunes for, deciding what to let go, what to burn a fresh copy and leave it at that, what to replace with a new CD.

Quite a different wrinkle in the range of choices there, and it's been making me think about this transition to a standalone-media-optional world. Digital downloads have dominated my music purchases recently, and I haven't been losing any sleep over issues of lower audio quality, lack of packaging or the arguable ephemerality of a digital purchase. But this recent loss has made me realize there is still a pretty sharp line between a digital download and a physical CD in my mind. Where I have (or had) a CD I think of that as the master copy; even if I have MP3s ripped to my hard drive I don't feel like I still have that album: I still have to decide whether I think it essential enough that I'll need to replace it with a new CD.

There are excellent reasons for valuing a CD in the digital download age - not least because when technological development eliminates the need for compression of audio files, anything on CD will allow a free fidelity upgrade. But I have a feeling the distinction I'm making is primarily psychological. I don't feel like digital purchases I've made recently are less of an album than CDs I've bought. But I bought those CDs I lost and mentally, I'm feeling the loss of an object.

I think about loss differently with digital files. To me, psychologically, there is no "original" or "master" copy. The data on my hard drive is regularly reiterated in backups, and total loss of anything that's been backed up, while not impossible, would certainly involve something fairly catastrophic.

The distinctions I'm chewing over are not really practical or technical ones. The interesting inner reality it boils down to is that my purchasing habits have evolved to a new environment but there is still a lot of an old mentality present as far as how I view my music as possessions. It is a distinction I expect to continue eroding until the possession of a physical object becomes genuinely obsolete.

A final thought this whole consideration puts me in mind of is that, while I currently scorn the "subscription" model of digital music (I mean, where you pay for access that you lose when your subscription lapses), I can see a real place for the underlying service model where maintenance of the "master copy" is handled remotely. Already, managing the footprint music occupies on my hardware memory is an issue. I might well find it worth paying for some centralization that could render loss obsolete and provide me with software and statistical tools for managing it all - downgrading the seldom-used to remote maintenance, optimizing the currently popular for distributed access, and so forth. In the current environment it would probably be a legal tangle, and memory, bandwidth and wireless developments will radically change how it all pans out. But I suspect the model of data management as a service will play a big role in the future of music as commerce. The end of physical ownership that could, ironically, render the music one "owns" far less ephemeral than mere disks of plastic - which can disappear with a momentary lapse of attention.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Brad Does Not Suck: real indie at last.

Update: September 2008: Brad Sucks recently released a new CD, Out of It. Given the minor technical glitch I experienced with the sale in the review below, a note on my most recent retail experience: my pre-order sale went through without a hitch, I got a head's up email on release day that my downloads were enabled, and got the album with no problems. Everything I like about Brad Sucks has stayed just as good, though. This recent blog update gives details about how he's sticking with the "open source" mentality that characterized the first album release. And those dumb humps over at Pitchfork still never heard of him.

Original Review

Ottowa-based Brad Sucks has everything a person ought to need to be a mainstream success. Musically solid, catchy, lots of smartly-woven musical threads drawing on sources from dance to Detroit rock guitarsmanship to country. All delivering sharply written, economical lyrics sung in an appealing baritone (Brad informs me he thinks he's actually a low tenor) that's a perfect fit to the words. But of course I'm not reviewing music here, I'll have to leave that up to Pitchfork. Apparently nobody over at Pitchfork reads William Gibson's blog, though, as Brad Sucks is of this writing unknown there. In summary, new media or not, there's still a lot of holes in the net, and my opinion is not yet a significant factor in what "blows up."

Now I've known of Brad Sucks for a while, and in fact shared space on a compilation album I may have mentioned previously with him (he and I appearing as alter egos frenetic and nanojath respectively, lower case represent!), and I've been looking forward to listening to his full album, I Don't Know What I'm Doing, for a long time, but I had this idea rolling around in my brain that I was going to start the Phree Musique Blog again as a digital music store review site, so I squirreled away that link in a folder with lots of company and, you know, years passed.

Of course my unreliable writing strategy need not have interfered with my listening to all the music and then some, since Brad offers lower quality free downloads, full production files for the remix-minded (and plenty of the remixed for free as well). But this is one of the persistent downsides of the internet: out of sight, out of mind.

So after taking something like three years after deciding I wanted to own it to purchase the album I don't know how much I should complain that it took four or five days for my digital album to be available to download. It was my own fault for mindlessly agreeing to whatever PayPal defaulted to and electing to pay with an e-check, the banking industry's for its "shit don't happen weekends or holidays" policy (I ordered just before Thanksgiving), and it must be said a glitch in Brad's self-coded store that the download stayed hung up even after the e-check cleared (the open source store software is still another totally cool Brad service, though). I did eventually have to clear it up with an email, which was quickly and politely dealt with. Doubtless the kink is already worked out. I also don't doubt that an email at any point in the transaction would have gotten the files unlocked.

Other than that the store itself is simple with lots of options (OGG and FLAC files are available for you purists, along with the 192k MP3s for us philistines) and the commerce half is the standard PayPal experience. If I'd used a credit card (or trusted PayPal to hang on to more of my money) it would have been transparent commerce. My only other complaint is that I still think a buck a track is too steep, particularly for direct sale, and though the full album gets a price break it's the same cost as the physical CD (though you save shipping): I imagine this is a conscious choice and I suppose there's an argument for uniform pricing. I still crave a bargain when shopping digital files, and more than the "save on shipping" variety.

Still, the package when it arrived pretty much blew away the competition thus far: I've been complaining about the stinginess with the metadata in a context where delivering additional data is all but free: I was very pleased to see files for the full CD booklet (with lyrics) and even a circular formatted label if you're the sort of person who prints labels for your CD-Rs.

In short, I expect great things from Brad Sucks: definitely one to watch. I think in most respects he sets the bar higher for the pure digital commerce experience. Pitchfork take note.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

The Screw Up: a Thanksgiving essay on unintended consequences

So I made an online purchase from a single artist store a couple days ago, which is still pending as of this writing. I know, right? Intolerable. But it's complicated, I'm not sure if I myself, the artist, or PayPal is primarily to blame. Obviously a review of the experience is out of the question for now, anyway. I'll tell you all about it when my download clears. Anyway, it seemed like a good excuse to slip in an essay.

I get lost sometimes in contemplation of how badly the record business screwed up their business model with the CD. I tend to be well behind the curve, technologically, but I knew they'd blown it when one of my more with it friends explained to me that their computer's CD-ROM drive played music CDs and did so by virtue of some 3rd party, unaffiliated software. Actual mix "tapes" were still the norm at this point: we're talking about ten, twelve years ago.

Pushing a media transition to a completely unprotected data format on what is shaping up to be the first popular post-diskette media for computers probably isn't the sort of mistake the record boys would make today but then I doubt they'll get another opportunity to screw around with formats. Music went post-media without them.

What I was thinking about recently though was that they also screwed the product aesthetically in the shift to the CD and that this in no small part is facilitating the disappearance of a discrete object from the recorded music equation. As a general rule I'm perfectly happy to have a bit of digital image the size of four postage stamps replace the packaging of my CDs. The artwork's just barely superior, the metadata tends to the mundane (and marginally usable). And the jewel case? The jewel case is the cruel joke of an arrogant orthodoxy.

Maybe this is one of the opportunities of the nascent marketplace in the pure digital sound: can anyone deliver an aesthetic experience along with the megabytes? Because the evidence of my explorations so far suggests that no, you can't. Maybe that's done now, for music, and your four postage stamps is what you get, or maybe your video is your new jacket art, filmed in Canada to replace printed in. Still, if you're looking for some stand out angle to distinguish your little pop stand along the fabled superhighway, it might bear considering.

Give thanks for unintended consequences. Back after the holiday.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Intellectual Property: a study in contrasts

It seems to me a grave discourtesy, to say no more, to issue my book without even a polite note informing me of the project... However that may be, this paperback edition and no other has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it, and no other. And if the many kind readers who have encouraged me with their letters will add to their courtesy by referring friends or enquirers to Ballantine Books, I shall be very grateful.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, internationally famous author and cultural icon, foreword to the 1965 paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings

Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid's face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work. How can you pick on them? They've got freckles. That's a crook. He may as well be wearing a bandit's mask.

Gene Simmons, minor reality television celebrity and cultural dinosaur, 2007 Billboard Interview

I was finally getting around to patching up my battered paperback boxed set of The Lord of the Rings - nostalgically purchased for a few dollars for being twins to the set that introduced me to the trilogy - my father's original set that he purchased when he was just a few years out of the Seminary. I first read that statement about the authorized edition over twenty years ago: reading it again I was struck by the contrast to Simmons' tough guy melodrama I'd read the day before.

My dad has related to me many times how he picked up the first book of Ace's unauthorized (and hastily assembled, and error-ridden) edition off a rack without knowing anything about the book, only to discover it was part of a trilogy. His attempts to mail order the rest of the series ran afoul of the publicity backlash Ace experienced when Tolkien spread the word that the edition had been produced without his consent (and without payment to him), which spurred Ace to pull the volume and pay Tolkien a compensatory pittance. Ace's edition was probably legal, as it exploited a loophole in U.S. copyright law, but popular outcry led them drop the book without legal compulsion.

Some interesting comparisons could be contemplated between the current business situation of the "record industry" and Tolkien and his British publisher's plight in the mid 1960's, though the situations are very far from perfectly analogous. Indeed, there is a whole other article to be had picking apart Simmons' assertions about the business of music - his comparison of the perceived value of music to the price of gold is in itself a lesson in twentieth century information psychology (extending the analysis to a slightly more apt comparison, such as to the market in diamonds as the age of inexpensive engineered gemstones evolves might make for particularly interesting investigation).

But what really struck me is the contrast in the tone and content of these two statements. Simmons' tirade, while nominally directed against the record industry, bears every hallmark of the party line. From the dire assumption of the death of commercial music (with a quick violin riff for all the little people whose livelihoods will be destroyed), to the conflation of file sharing with robbery, and particularly the assumption that the only possible solution would have been massive, heavy-handed legal retribution against individuals to cow the public into respecting copyright out of fear.

Tolkien doesn't warn of some cataclysm in the business of publishing books or even suggest that his own fortunes will be destroyed by the unauthorized publication of his works. He does not treat the legalities of the issue at all, and he certainly does not suggest that individuals who might have taken advantage of Ace's cheaper edition (by selling or buying it) deserved to suffer some consequence for their action. His formal, almost courtly plea suggests that the reader might find the critical question to be of all things one of courtesy.

The appeal to courtesy is something that the the major labels and their chattels have utterly lost access to in the midst of their ongoing assault of legal attacks, specious and ham-handed social engineering, and the technological insults of DRM. More independent players who elected not to stumble along with this failed campaign might yet make very good use of it, I think.

Tolkien aside, it perpetually blows my mind that the press is willing to give a pass to the assertions of self-appointed experts like Gene Simmons that the financial woes of the record industry can be devolved to one thing: college kids with computers and their devilish P2P voodoo. It leads me to seriously consider whether the primary function of the RIAA is not so much the Sisyphean task of staunching the industry's ongoing hemorrhage as to ensconce firmly in the public mind this particular scapegoat. Which wouldn't necessarily be a surprising goal since common sense and an increasing body of empirical evidence suggest a raft of alternative contributions to the decline in music industry revenues, which mostly boil down to stupid business practices by a lazy, profligate industry that lost any serious engagement with innovation somewhere around the mid-nineties. There could be no more blatant example than the fact that the industry's current, tentative forays into selling DRM-free digital downloads comes a good seven years late (and five years after finally suing fresh-faced college student Shawn Fanning's Napster off the face of the earth, Mr. Simmons take note) - a decision based solely on the almost unimaginably technologically incompetent assertion that unencumbered digital files would somehow contribute to illicit file sharing in a manner that conventional CDs would not.

There are lessons of opportunity in every one of these examples. Every year the conventional industry fails to adapt is a year of opportunity for everyone else to take advantage of customers like me: I'm spending more money on music than ever, to a large degree because of the superior value I'm getting from alternative markets and my conviction that for the most part I'm buying through avenues that give the artists themselves a better deal. And when my (at least) third-hand copy of The Lord of the Rings wears out completely I'll be sure to buy a new copy that contributes to the estate. As a courtesy.

Amazon.com: test driving the big Kahuna

I'm not a big fan of Amazon.com, to put it right out front, mainly because of their patent hijinx and "relaxed" attitudes towards privacy. In fact, I'm pretty sure I pompously "canceled my account" in an energetically written email inspired by some outrage de jour, several years back. Of course, they never flushed my data, as I discovered to little surprise when I came slinking back at some later date, snared in the unethical pincers of the lowest available price...

Indeed, I was moderately horrified upon signing in for the first time in quite a while to discover that my account (with credit card info preloaded and ready) was still hanging out there guarded only by my old, pre-paranoia, weakish password that I used to secure EVERYTHING with before some weird though inconclusive anomalies turned up on a credit card account and spooked me into converting anything identity-theftalicious over to strong, pain-in-the-ass long strings of gibberish passwords. Take that, NSA!

Anyway.

So despite my ambiguous relationship with the great flagship of ye olde internette bubble the first (another list in that long line of things I never thought I'd find myself doing: pining for the nineties), I found it very significant and exciting when Amazon announced the launch of its DRM-free MP3 download store. Let's not mince words: this is the first and at this point only competition to iTunes. I'm talking, of course, about the mainstream here, and I don't expect this bicameral hegemony to last long. Still, although my credentials as a capitalist are shaky, I believe in the value of competition to optimize transactional systems, and seeing this unfold in a nascent marketplace in real time definitely turns my crank. And honestly, I've been fairly impressed with what I've been seeing out of Amazon recently, as regards commoditization of data transaction, so I've been eager to check the new kid on the block out.

It would be real interesting to find out what sort of wrangling it took to get a serious chunk of the major labels' catalogs available without DRM. I have a sneaky suspicion that the prospect of sticking it to Apple, which seems to have a less than idyllic relationship with many of its content providers, had a place in this equation. But alas such questions are beyond the scope of my little review project. Perhaps someone will write a book someday. Let's get to the core commerce experience.

I'm proceeding on the assumption that Gentle Reader comes with previous experience with the Amazon shopping paradigm. Up to checkout shopping the online store is pretty identical. You're encouraged to grab a little download manager app, and indeed I believe it is mandatory to download full albums, but the process is conventional and painless (as long as you don't mind clicking "I agree" boxes without first doing a lot of tedious reading to find out which rights you're clicking away this time). I'd recommend installing it up front.

The MP3 Downloads Department front page is the same witlessly organized, overstuffed (six page-downs of scroll!) mess we've all come to know and love (amusingly led, in this case, by shameless exploitation of iPod iconography, universal symbol of the digital music). I'll freely admit I don't have ready alternatives for the apparently inescapable melange of useless genre category sidebars, "hot new picks," and row after row of brainless categories... featured artists (why look honey, Jay-Z is featured. Let's check that young man out), the spotlighted, the new, the hot, and in the basement, the inevitable blogged. I won't let my lack of solutions stop me from pointing out what a travesty this sort of virtual mall experience is on the downhill side of the 21st century, decade one. At least the search toolbar, the only thing on the page that's worth a damn, is at the top.

Search is, of course, rendering ever-widening swaths of data presentation obsolete, and to be honest I had to kind of force myself to notice what a junkyard the front page was. My inclination is to automatically ignore it and just start looking for what I want. Amazon's search is perfectly functional, I found what I was looking for first time out 3 tries in a row.

For purchasing, it appears Amazon has adopted the iTunes "pay as you go" system: there isn't a shopping cart feature for downloads: everything goes through 1-click (and you can stick your registered trademark up your @-hole, Amazon). While this isn't such a burden if you're buying albums, it's as stupid system for a la carte downloads on Amazon as it is on iTunes, maybe more so as Amazon already has the architecture of a shopping cart in place.

Beyond this, the downloads went mostly smoothly. They went into my iTunes library automatically, a welcome feature for a third party vendor. The album art showed up as well, though at this point I've got so many widgets and doodads managing musical metacontent that it's hard to tell if Amazon had anything to do with that.

I had one scare with my purchases. Some downloaded content stopped showing up in iTunes in the middle of the process, apparently as the result of my dicking around with unrelated iTunes files while the transfer was ongoing. When I saw the missing songs listed as complete in Amazon's download manager window I feared an interaction with customer support was in my future. I should say it's hard to say whether this error was Amazon's fault, something to do with iTunes, or the result of my overstuffed hard drive, which is causing my aging G4 iMac to gag over pretty much any kind of multitasking these days.

Whatever the case, a handy "Reveal in Finder" button on the download manager showed that only the transfer to the iTunes library had been arrested - the files were safely ensconced in a welcome new Amazon downloads folder in my iTunes music files. My buddies over at eMusic (I'll get to you, I'll get to you!) could take some lessons from Amazon's download management protocols. I called the missing tracks up from within iTunes and all was well.

The prices are pretty conventional, too high in my book, in other words - mostly $.99, occasionally $.89 a track. M.I.A. gave me a break for buying the whole album on Kala (yay), no such love from Steely Dan, however (boo). I bought three LPs and spent a little under $23, not terrible, but hopefully that competition factor will actually kick in at some point. Still, I ended up with well-organized albums of 256 kbps MP3s intelligently fed into my computers music filing system.

Bottom line: Amazon delivers an impressive catalog of DRM-free albums and tracks at market-fair but uninspiring prices. The browsing interface is typically clunky but the download manager is simple and helpful, and the mesh with iTunes virtually seamless. I have no reservations saying that Amazon has earned its place as an essential vendor for any serious consumer of digital downloads. Amazon, my grudging props to you.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Stay tuned, new soon...

Ambition. Well, it surely was not my intent to get the recreation of this underway and then immediately get stalled by day to day circumstances. But I did. But I'm looking to get back rolling next week, look for a new music buying experience November 12, you can read a bit more about the details over at the song of the day weblog.

The times, they are a'changin'... Link roundup

In between reviews I plan to do some topical roundups of relevant links and the occasional essay.

It's been a hell of a couple of weeks for the major labels. EMI's new moneyman owner notices his newly acquired industry has been getting run into the ground by fat cat executives with no vision. The music guy for the last relevant internet portal business tells said fat cat executives "your business model sucks, so I'm not going to use it anymore." But the big news is without question the artists. Radiohead. Trent Reznor. Jamiriquoi and Oasis. The currently unsigned and soon-to-be-released are making news with announcements and rumors of taking to the heady waters of self-distribution.

Even download-hating, "what the fuck do you think you're doing" label queen Madonna is said to be in negotiations to ditch Warner Bros. for a decidedly unconventional relationship with a concert promoter, though that particular deal sounds more like "I reject you, Satan, in favor of you, Satan Prime!" It's still an industry, after all. Nevertheless, as far as the business of music is concerned, we do seem to be blessed with the curse of living in interesting times. Let's observe a moment of silence together and imagine a record company executive shitting a brick.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Okay... Computer? Radiohead imitates some dude in a basement

As Radiohead's "historic" offer is now defunct and they show little interest in continuing as a download provider I'm decommissioning this review, so to speak. Read more here. I'm also downgrading my assessment to "shrugs" out of pure spite.

Of course I'm pushing two weeks behind the curve of the hype on the Radiohead "pay what you like" digital download of their latest album, In Rainbows.

And I'll admit: a part of me is a little annoyed by the degree of swooning, "this changes everything" coverage Radiohead's payment-optional experiment has received. I covered Jane Siberry doing this very thing in March of '06, and it was old news then (what Siberry calls "self-determined pricing" is still the standard at her site and it is still well worth checking out, incidentally). From "try it for free, buy if you feel it" presentations like Harvey Danger to every unsigned solo with free MP3s and a virtual tip jar, "payment optional" is hardly a new deal.

Even so, the distinction here is obvious. Radiohead is a major international act that has demonstrated its ability to debut an album at the top of the charts and sell a million copies in the U.S. alone. After wrapping up their contract with EMI in 2003 they could have rung up any of the major or major-minor labels and entered serious negotiations for a big money record deal. Not selling out is a different kind of decision when there are plenty of interested buyers with deep pockets.

And like a lot of people, I'm happy to see anything that motivates more public dialog about getting past the absurdly counterproductive artificial restrictions of the conventional market for music (and indeed for information in general).

So much for philosophy: on to the commerce experience.

I'll lead with the negatives. If Radiohead deserves bigger kudos for risking an unconventional distribution strategy as a big ticket act, then I give them worse marks for delivering a somewhat clunky, confusing sales experience. When I used it the website was very slow, and the actual transaction was not straightforward.

There are only two products for sale on the site - a costly (around $80 U.S.) discbox that includes vinyl LPs and CDs in premium packaging, and the price-unspecified digital download. Since a download is included in the price of the discbox, there is no reason to purchase more than one of these items. So the fact that the purchaser is forced to go through an "add item to cart/proceed to checkout" sales process is pointless and particularly irritating when each redundant click initiates another glacially slow page load (to add insult to injury, you have to click through two pointless front pages to get to the point where you can actually elect to purchase. I could have saved you the trouble by linking directly to the order page, but I'd hate for you to miss out on the complete Radiohead experience).

Now I could be accused of nitpicking, so I want to reiterate: to the extent that Radiohead made a statement about the roll affordable digital downloads can and should play in commercial music, they diluted this statement by delivering a poorly executed and tedious commerce experience.

Other cons included the fact that the site failed to deliver specifics about the download - format, number of tracks, or overall length - details I considered important to setting a price for the download (I eventually found these facts reported by third parties), some glitches in the checkout process resulting in getting kicked back to blank forms, and the fact that the download delivered only the MP3 tracks, no artwork or lyrics (I know I'm bucking established trends but damn it, delivering data is cheap. If you've got more, give it! Particularly when the purchaser's only options are a very expensive premium physical product versus a bare-bones digital download). Finally, I'm never thrilled when a purchase form requires I enter a mobile phone number. What if Radiohead won't stop texting me?

Moving on to the positives: I'd say that purchasing the album was not a terrible experience, merely substandard. Once I made it to the actual payment screen things went smoothly enough, and I quickly ended up with a link to a reasonably speedy download. The price was right - I elected to pay what I consider a very reasonable $3 (I'll tell you right now that my opinion that the general cost of music online is inflated is going to be an ongoing theme here) - which came out to £1.47. They tacked on a £0.45 service fee for a total £1.92 or about $3.92 U.S. For this I received a 48.4 MB zip archive of 10 160kbps MP3s. The tracks had correctly encoded metadata (mangled or absent track metadata is a HUGE pet peeve) so firing it up in iTunes was a cinch. I had successfully purchased my first Radiohead album. I liked it.

The bottom line: while I wouldn't tolerate this sort of technical incompetence from a website dedicated to selling digital music, I'm going to give Radiohead the benefit of the doubt in assuming that inexperience in the digital market and underestimating the volume of response the offer would receive were more at work in what was wrong with this transaction than actual indifference to the purchaser experience. So on the three point scale I just this moment invented of Props, Shrugs or Hate, I give Radiohead Props. Congratulations, Radiohead, you can now proudly display "the Phree Musique Blog gave the In Rainbows purchase site props!" on your website. Note: not anymore, as noted above. You mopey Limey bastards.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page

Digital Music Sellers Review Index

Note, January 17 2010: I won't be updating the index any longer. The way I've got it set up is just too tedious to modify for the nominal utility it offers.

Index of Digital Music Sellers reviewed on the Phree Musique blog. Updated as reviews are added. To submit a site for review or note a change, mistake or disappearance of any previously reviewed link please leave a comment on this entry.

Multiple Artist Sites

Site Link : Review Link : Site Notes and Genre Info : Bottom Line*

1. Amazon.com : Review : Eclectic catalog of mostly mainstream downloads, all genres : Props
2. eMusic : Review : One of the originals with a huge indie catalog : Props
3. iTunes Music Store : Review : Apple's original Big Box digital infotainment megastore : Shrugs
4. Rhapsody MP3 Downloads : Review : Routine retail with the bonus of full streaming previews : Props

Single Artist Sites

Site Link : Review Link : Site Notes and Genre Info : Bottom Line*

1. Radiohead DOWNLOAD SITE CLOSED : Review : Download site for single album, Alt Rock : Shrugs
2. Brad Sucks : Review : Two solid alt-rock albums with lots of diverse freebies on the site : Props

*Sites judged on 3 point scale from Hate to Shrugs to Props where Hate is bad and Props are good.

We'll Get a New Deal for Christmas This Year

Previously on the Phree Musique blog...

I'd been posting links to free, available-for-the-download MP3s that were, to the best of my ability to determine, pretty much legal. Which equivocating phrase indicates that, even eschewing the gang of plainly illegal MP3 blogs which infest the Tubes, there was an awful lot of ambiguity in the free music biz.

Well, no more. We turn our attention now to music which is free as in, well, as in not free. While Apple, Amazon, EMI and Yahoo! have been making news lately by offering or at least talking about selling digital music without digital rights management (DRM) technology in place, many independent labels have been doing it for years. I'm going to try them all out and report back on the new digital music shopping experience.

My rules for inclusion:

1. You must be able to purchase digital files outright.
2. The files must be totally free of DRM. I'm not going to get into issues some have raised like dodgy, personally identifying metadata in the files (iTunes Plus) or overzealous terms of use (Amazon).

And that's about it. If you want to submit a site for review please leave a comment on the Index Page

Totally not phree musique!

To order the CD click here!

I recently participated in the creation of a collectively arranged and managed music CD featuring pieces by members of the community weblog metafilter.com.

This CD is now complete and will be shipping by the end of November, and features a recording I made of one of the songs of the day, Obsession, among 24 other tracks.

Profits will be donated to a nonprofit music education charity for children. I hope you'll consider buying a copy, because otherwise I will deny any knowledge of you when I am rich and famous. But seriously, I think it's going to be a great and quirky CD and well worth owning for 12 bucks, shipping included (17 for international delivery).

You can read about the album by clicking here
And read my artist profile by clicking here

Order the CD click here!

Thanks for listening -

Jon/aka nanojath/aka Scrivener

-=-

In the meantime... there remains one last thing that I am will persist in trying to keep up with daily... behold the fairly secret song of the day blog.

Sorry

Permanent Vacation?

Sorry, indefinite hiatus. Life, stuff, you know how it is. Feel free to forget that it ever existed.

Corn Dogs for the Pickin'

MF Doom is one of these rappers who seems to generate loose, loping flows of laid back rhyme much like an apple tree generates apples. DJ Dangermouse may currently be best known for the "Grey Album", a conflation of the Beatles' White Album and Jay Z's Black Album which is enough of a cultural artifact now that it is reliably available despite being totally illegal. This aside, Dangermouse is a prolific remixer.

When these two radical vectors collide with the Cartoon Network's experimental media laboratory Adult Swim, the resultant "Danger Doom" is a free roaming, monstrously self-referential acid treat I can't make heads or tails of. But they're giving away free MP3s, so hey. I think the lyrics may be, you know, unsuitable for minors. But I can't really tell.

Scrivener downloaded...
A full EP is now available at Adult Swim - download Occult Hymn here.

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Summer Vacation is Almost Over

Alright, I've been needing a bit of a break. Regular updates will resume in June, though still at a reduced pace (probably only one a week) until the garden no longer needs attention, which will be I dunno, some time in September or so? Please do check back in around the first week of June.

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Another reprise - spiffyaudio presents "stuff"

Every so often somebody I've linked to gets back to me. Brandon at spiffyaudio did, and hooked me up with a link to a page of just all kinds of cool stuff. W00t.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
10 Hour Frankenstein

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the end and then what: more UBUWEB

Initially I thought to evade the question of legality entirely by not wandering outside the boundaries of artist-hosted downloads. Of course things got grey almost from the get go. Too many people playing it a bit fast and loose with the samples, too many people tugging hard on the loose ends of the clumsy stitches that sew up the mismatched bundle of concepts that make up "information ownership" - the ragged boundaries of territories like "fair use" and the "public domain." And what tends to be more interesting to me - things that are old and weird enough that it's hard to tell who, if anyone, would know whether any rights are retained, and if so by whom, and nobody seems particularly inclined to find out or do anything about people simply common-lawing it into practical, if not legal, public domains.

A common theme if you've been paying attention is just not looking at or acknowledging that there is an issue, or the closely related expression of the sentiment "it's just a hobby, please don't sue me." It's refreshing to come across something like the UBUWEB FAQ where a bracing, direct approach is taken: "We post many things without permission; we also post many with things with permission. We therefore give you permission to take what you like even though in many cases, we have no received permission to post it. We went ahead and did it anyway. You should too."

There's also a little bit of this: "UbuWeb has no need for funding. All work is done solely on a volunteer basis."

And: "Nothing is for sale on UbuWeb. It's all free. We know it's a hard idea to get used to, but there's no lush gift shop waiting for you at the end of this museum."

Mmmmm, post-capitalicious. More importantly, I figured out what UBUWEB was actually about, finally: avante garde. So awesome, so anachronistic. The 365 Days Project is a bit off that mission, maybe, but so deep, so rich. Just what it says, 365 days, 365 MP3s, the definition of odd and obscure. Faultless metadata, of course: plug and play with the music engine of your choice. We'll be back there many times, I'm sure.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Major Tom by the Space Lady.

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Summer Hours

I'm going to be ridiculously busy this summer so I'm instituting summer hours, in other words no Phriday Phun until I stop having to mow grass. I'll continue to shoot for posts on Monday and Wednesday mornings.

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The 23rd Century

I'm just about out of links. What I mean is, I store these things up, as I cruise the infosphere, these links. I don't go out looking for them, you know? They just turn up. I bookmark them in the Phree Musique? folder and then later I review them. Many are rejected for many reasons. Some are not really music places and some don't have the sort of download I generally demand. Some vanish and some are just bad. I had a pretty big backlog when I started, because like every other underemployed bored wage slave in the modern world I abused the internet when I had a regular office job. I have more exacting responsibilities now and the links have not been growing back as fast as they accumulated. I have many rich fields of possibility to explore, but nevertheless, things are bound to slow down for a while while I refuel. More on that tomorrow.

For now, I give you the 23rd Century, which for all its aggressive lofi weirdness style is (so much as I've heard so far) pretty much straightforward rock. It's all right. And after twenty minutes of weeding out this and that rotten MySpace functionality, songs in stupid formats (WMA? Please. What is this, 1998?), duplicates, Angelfire sites that don't load (and again: welcome to the 21st century, it's time to abandon that slide rule) a straightforward domain with functional direct downloads is a real treat.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
The Future Is Then

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I'm pretty sure it demonstrates some kinda point... Mixtape by Mercedes Benz

I'm not what you'd call a fan of Mercedes Benz. Like BMW it is a brand that seems to attract asshole drivers and in my epistemology it falls firmly in the territory of clubs you have to wait in line to get into: stupid ego shit for rich people. Just remember, under the hood it's all Chrysler now.

So what am I to make of the Mercedes Benz Mixtape. Every ten weeks they are offering more or less a full length comp of, oh, you know, alternative music and stuff. Why? What does it all mean? I couldn't tell you. All I know is, if I can abuse Mercedes Benz bandwidth while not buying their product, I'm gonna. They say you have to disable popup blocking but you don't really, just keep bulling through.

No direct links, it's all kinda slick flash player interface but the download process is relatively simple, especially if you elect the download all function. So shiny.

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The future of... hmm... Underheard.org

Update: 10/10/06: The management over at Underheard.org dropped me a line recently and took exception with my characterization below of the likely legality of the operations over there. Briefly, it stated that they had sought legal counsel prior to putting up the site and believed that their operations were legal, and that this legality required that the shows they highlight be archived in full - challenging three of my points below.

I responded with a request for permission to post their response in full and the offer for them to give additional input but I have received no further response. I accept their word that I was wrong in my characterization that they had not seriously considered the legal situation in creating their site, and for this I apologize. I have no idea whether what they are doing is in fact legal. As they've elected not to respond I'll consider the subject closed.

I was dissing the podcast the other day, and Underheard.org kind of puts me in mind of my, let us say, doubts about the form. This is an aggregator, basically, they have collected links from a bunch of podcasting alternative radio shows and put them in one place. Obviously I'm in no position to badmouth aggregation. But there are some issues. This is yet another place (and I'd planned to be more circumspect about this to start with but it's just so prevalent) where the basic legal attitude is, hey, that's their stuff, we sure hope it's all basically legal, but. And what the hell, I link to it so no I must by necessity adopt the attitude as well... but I can't shake this feeling that this sort of laxness is going to bite the whole enterprise repeatedly on the ass as time goes on, and ultimately either choke it off via legislation/litigation or simply limit it to the DIY boho pomo yoyo brigade - not that that's the worst thing that could happen to it (the free software movement, by contrast, has at least in principle positioned copyright legality and intellectual property traceability as central concerns from the start... (Hmmm, who's running the Phree Sophtwhere Blog?)).

From a purely technical sense downloading a whole show just seems like a waste to me, you probably aren't going to keep the thing, so it's work, it's clutter to maintain it. The 'Pods maybe need to get a little Tivo going on, gain the ability to sort of choose and archive from the stream, make suggestions and help you manage the housekeeping of more ephemeral species of content like a podcast show. I downloaded an hour long show, about 53 MB. With good broadband and say a 20 gig HD player, this is a pretty manageable wodge of data. That's a hefty barrier to entry there, though. On accelerated dialup, with a 1 gig flash player, if you're off to work the next morning and you decide the whole thing sucks, you might just feel resentful about your time. Right now, for example, I'm enjoying this podcast I downloaded okay. But it's a total craps shoot, beyond a paragraph or two of description you just control click and see what happens. It would not take too many misses for me to give up on the whole enterprise. (And I'm pretty damn certain, now, that it's in no way legal. But sorting that out is Prodigy's problem, I think. But I won't be keeping a copy, the first Phree Musique download I won't have held on to).

What I really feel like is that this simulation of a broadcast is inherently regressive. What's really interesting to me is what comes after. A package as portable, useful, intuitive as radio is yet to come. Yes, radio is totally limited - a choice of streams, essentially. But how much different is a podcast aggregator, really? A lot more channels, theoretically infinite channels. That, of course is both the danger and the opportunity of the new form.

Scrivener downloaded...(as noted above the download link is now defunct).

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Regionality gets interesting: Podbop

I should really make a note of where I pick these links up. I have no idea of whether I'm just rehashing slashdot or metafilter N weeks after the fact or what. Nevertheless: podbob is cool.

Now, I've got a problem with the term "podcast." I don't think that combining an MP3 download with an RSS feed is such a paradigm shaker as to merit its own fresh minted snappy neologism, particularly one that has to mine a commercial trademark for its punch, and for a product that isn't even as old as this crummy century.

And may I say: the 21st? So far? Worst century ever. Seriously. I know, it's not even a decade old, but hey, we're on the flipside of the first one and you only get ten per. More than halfway through the first decade and not one great thing has happened. No, seriously, name one. No moonwalks, no Berlin walls falling, shit, not a Revolver or hell, even a Thriller released. Anyone mentions artic monkeys I will kick your ass. It sucks.

Consider: does anybody remember that the iPod was released just over a month after 9/11? October 2001, damn, remember October 2001? That first case of post-office anthrax. Meet Tom Ridge. Hey, Tom Ridge, you never know, he could be a reader, if so, you're doing a heck of a job, T-bone. But wasn't I supposed to get some kind of preparedness kit in the mail? Duct tape and stuff? The concert for New York City, Windows XP, and the iPod. Progress marches on, huh?

But, uh, this isn't the blog about web metaphysics or what's popularly referred to as culture. No, heh, heh, this jest bes the phree musique blog, aw, wes jest sing and dance here, we shore nuff loves to sing. So check it out: Podbop. Couldn't be simpler: enter your city and state (in the format New York, NY works), get a list of upcoming shows in your city, with Sample MP3s of the bands. See, now that makes sense. I dialed up Minneapolis and got me some phree tunes no problem. A couple things to watch out for:

Formats: mostly MP3 but the odd RAM stuck in there

"Samples": of course, who's product is too valuable and important to merit giving away a whole song? The Strokes. No, I but jest, it's cheesy but I suppose a thing like the market dynamics of a single is beyond my ken, and there is a full free song, which I'm in fact linking to, the closest thing to a popular download as I've featured, or am likely to.

Metadata. Or the lack thereof. Again, The Strokes? You better clean up your act, this popped out in iTunes as "Track 1," no other information. You think I want to spend all day typing out information about the free things you give me? That's no way to build a fan.

Download speeds: by the way, you can't blame this shit on Podbop, they're just linking to content hosted by the creators or their agencies. It looked like some of the sites were getting hammered, though nothing took more than a few minutes.

All in all a fine idea, and well executed. Of course the devil in the details is, how much, and how well, how close does it see? And more importantly, will it get people into shows? Of course, listing is at the discretion of the artists, and going to shows is the responsibility of the end-user, so I guess Podbop could say it's up to you. What's in it for them is an interesting question to investigate as well.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
12:51 by The Strokes

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Here's a new concept: make your own, uh, noise

The great thing about having a phree and "legal" MP3 blog is that you don't have to stick to any contextual guidelines. Boodler is not really an MP3 site at all, though I did download the four sample clips because I like having these weird brief interlude files cluttering up my music folders, to add color to random shuffles in iTunes. Boodler is in fact a "soundscape" generation software device, and I couldn't tell you much about it because while I've downloaded it I haven't yet tried to get it to run on my iMac. I think I need the developer kit installed, and I think I don't have it installed, anymore, so it might not work. Anyway.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
blopping!

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Eww, Double Phridays

Meaning I went a whole week without writing an entry. And strangely nobody called to see if I was okay. Anyway, riffing along further on the Creative Commons tip, and an interesting intersection with, well, calling My Life in the Bush of Ghosts mainstream may be pushing it, but we're talking about David Byrne and Brian Eno here, not Buddy Weird's Online Variety Hour like I usually do.

And though the situation promises to change, there are no free downloads here yet, but "sometime soon" we're promised to see not just mp3s but track recordings for two songs, along with the option, if you're willing to klik some kinda enduser agreement and abide by a Creative Commons license, to take thus material and remix it for your own exquisite pleasure. While the terms sound a bit restrictive to me (it sort of sounds like you can only host your versions on the official site, which would be lame), it still interests me when artists of this profile start playing around with releasing their material. So watch this space for info on the remix downloads, and if you do something interesting with it (and play by the rules) send me a link and I'll showcase you on the site, seriously. It'll be like continuity and stuff.

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Phree Phreakin' Phriday... Staccato

I should say (or maybe, more probably, I shouldn't) that I don't really buy into the Creative Commons thing. I don't see that it really does anything besides generate a little boilerplate and add useless html to web pages to do a job that could be as easily accomplished by three lines of text. I retain copyright on my work. Everything I write is mine. Anybody wants use of it, they can be courteous and drop me a line. Reblogging is not mission critical, okay, you can wait a day to hear from me. Because unless you're, like, Sony or something I'm unlikely to object. Or if you're just too damn lazy to mooch over to my profile and shoot me an email, you could also just use it, and the chances are about a million to one I won't care or indeed notice. It's just text. Of course if worst came to it I might track you down and sue you in small claims court. I am confident I could persuade a judge to assess a value to any particular example of my writing of no less than five dollars, so watch it. Maybe you better just linky linky instead, no? This is the problem, as Staccato's slogan of "where we feature music that probably won't get you sued," probably unwittingly identifies. A license is no real protection against copyright infringement prosecution. It hasn't been put to any real tests yet but that's only because these free as in radical creation and distribution schemes don't yet have a big enough footprint among our most litigious citizens, that is to say, corporations. See, I figure, copyright is as strong as it gets. Everything past that is either redundant and encumbering (like the DMCA) or limiting (like Creative Commons). I don't know what horrible things you might do to my precious precious words. I might have to sue you on general principles over some outrage so dirty and low I can't even imagine it. I'm not about to water down my rights, I might need them. But that's just me. I understand people who go that way, and of course I'm not the slightest bit reluctant to link into their content to enliven my own. Stacatto is worth a visit, download whole shows or selected tracks from the newer ones. Frankly, once you get through the files not found and the weirdos (download in .ogg format? thanks, that's really helpful you damned hippy) there's not much trackwise business left. But of course it's about the show not the tracks. For them. I'm all about the tracks. Which is probably why the podcasting revolution is passing me by.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
fleur arabe by AMINOS

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Synthdude, a study in ten days

Now, I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone who decides to tackle a song a day project, even if, like Synthdude, they don't keep it up all that long. There are all kinds of failure, and as long as you aren't participating in the kind where you don't even try, you've got me swinging for your side. Points off for all the direct links to music being broken, though, but you can get to a selection of 'dude's stuff via the CNet's Download.com

Scrivener downloaded...
Through the Haze (No direct download link, use the Download Now links).

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The Scarring Party

Spooky cabaret brass with some messed up lyrics warbled in someone's best old-timey radio tenor. They seem a little exotic for Milwaukee but I'm probably just being prejudiced. After all, my men from Carbellion are from the big Dubya Eye as well. Anyway, The Scarring Party are well worth a visit.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Eat Your Young

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Take the red pill and see how deep the analog hole goes?

It's no secret that the media conglomerates and their agents are nosing around finding some way to close the so-called analog hole. This whole a-hole business flared up back around '02, '03 and now we've got another outbreak of a-hole fever in the form of the Sensenbrenner/Conyers Analog Hole Bill.

There is an aspect of this I haven't seen discussed yet. Although it wasn't discussed in these terms, didn't the 2600 DVD lawsuit address the analog hole directly, and at least suggest that it is protected under fair use?

The constitutional argument against the DMCA that 2600's lawyers made, that it represented a restriction of fair use rights, which was rejected by the court on the basis that it was still possible exercise fair use, was widely ridiculed at the time. The image of pointing a camcorder at your TV to make a "copy" of a DVD was held up as indicative of the kind of technologically clueless approach to the realities of the digital environment that made rotten legislation like the DMCA possible in the first place. But take another look at the language in the decision:

the DMCA does not impose even an arguable limitation on the opportunity to make a variety of traditional fair uses of DVD movies, such as commenting on their content, quoting excerpts from their screenplays, and even recording portions of the video images and sounds on film or tape by pointing a camera, a camcorder, or a microphone at a monitor as it displays the DVD movie.

Although the technological means described are crude, this is nothing less than a description of the analog hole. I can see no legal difference between pointing a camcorder or microphone at your television and recording a signal directly from the analog outputs on your computer, or indeed recording audio or video directly off the sound or video card of your computer...

This language suggests a legal precedent for a constitutional objection to any analog hole legislation. Just one more reason for electronics manufacturers to refuse to get on board.

All right, enough politics. Next week, back to my favorite kind of phree musique - the kind the artists want you to hear.

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Phelony Phreaking Phriday! G2P, the search string your mother warned you about

Now, as I've noted generally Phree Musique USA is not about the duplication and distribution of music against the wishes of the creator, let alone the copyright holder. It's not that I am one of these people itching to advocate that it is very wrong and bad to download Usher MP3s for free or whatever. I did a lot of cassette taping of stuff like my siblings' 80s alternative and new wave vinyl as a lad, you know, and it doesn't seemed to have turned me into an utterly depraved degenerate or put Sony out of business. And neither, frankly, will G2P. There is nothing much to this little hack (I'm not denigrating it, I couldn't have figured this out, I'm just saying it is not in its operation hugely technical or anything). Basically whatever you enter as the search text, it creates a search string in google with the syntax intitle:index.of "mp3" +"ARTIST NAME" -htm -html -php -asp "Last Modified"

What happens when you enter a music artist or group's name is that you find many results where someone, somewhere is hosting MP3s by that artist. Who knows why, maybe it is for their personal enjoyment or some little project among friends, maybe it is authorized and legal though probably it is not. I worry a little that relatively harmless people, even by P2P standards, may get rather randomly hassled as a result of this sort of thing. Then again, if you make Madonna tracks available on the internet, it's kind of a buyer beware (or giver-away beware I guess) situation.

Scrivener downloaded...
Why nothing at all of course. That would be ILLEGAL Nonetheless, always remember to...

Practice download etiquette: Rather than just clicking on MP3 links, please right click + "save as" (Windows) or control+click and "Download Linked File" (Mac). It will reduce the artists' bandwidth demands!

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minibosses

Yes, yes, more NES. What is it about the Nintendo, particularly the classic NES, that inspires so much musical homage? The minibosses describe themselves as "a phoenix based band dedicated to playing nes music with two guitars, a bass, and a drum set. we love playing, it's really fun." Clearly they disdain capitalization as well, but the only real issue at hand is simply this: these covers of Nintendo classics quite simply thrash. Which is perhaps the point: the source material is solid. Those NES hits just had catchy damn hooks. Put the classic rocik band setup behind it and you're rocking hard.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Ninja Gaiden Live

Practice download etiquette: Rather than just clicking on MP3 links, please right click + "save as" (Windows) or control+click and "Download Linked File" (Mac). It will reduce the artists' bandwidth demands!

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Jane Siberry: "I want everyone to leave feeling like they got a good deal"

About fifty million people like myself have had this revelation about creative production - skip the middleman, essentially - and gotten all excited about the coming revolution in which artists throw down the shackals of the Media Lords and give everybody a much better deal. Jane Siberry is clearly walking the talk with her Sheeba Records. I worry, though, because I fear we are all somewhere about a third of the way into a crushing lesson in the ways of this bad old world.

Case in point: what am I to make of Siberry's "Self-Determined Transactions" policy? Does it belong on the "Phree Musique" blog? Make no mistake: you can get music for free here. Go to the store, join the 19% of freeloaders (statistics on download behaviors are just one of the fascinating distinctions of the site) downloading the music for free. The process is a little more intensive than the usual fare here at Phree Musique USA. You must create an account and proceed through checkout as if it was an ordinary transaction. While in her letter on the pricing policy Siberry exhorts listeners to go with their gut and not feel guilt about their decisions, something about going through the usual process of commerce, but electing not to pay, is guilt inducing. You're following "the rules" but it still feels like you're cheating. On the whole, it is a little out of character for this blog, which is mainly about just plain old free stuff - click a link, get a song, end of story. Still, the whole setup is interesting enough to merit inclusion. And there even seems a reasonable chance that the meager entertainment budget will get tapped to "do the right thing" and actually purchase some songs.

Since the amount one pays is wholly self-determined, it seems petty to nitpick about pricing, but I'm the kind of jerk that just went ahead and ordered the song for free, and so quibble I will. .99 for a download is too steep. Yes, yes, iTunes set the precedent. It's the "going rate." It's what the "market will bear." No. The point is to distinguish the alternative from the mainstream, and a price break would be a great place to start. Well, the obvious objection is that you can elect to pay whatever you think is right. But the statistics show that natural inclination - over 80% of purchasers - elected to pay the suggested price. I feel like more might elect to go through the signup and purchase process if that suggested price looked like a deal rather than the old standard. I could of course be utterly wrong. Anyway - my other small issue is that the full album pricing is inconsistent. Sometimes you end up getting a price break for downloading the whole album, sometimes it costs more than doing individual tracks would.

But put all that aside and check Sheeba Records out. The music is solid, vocal driven and lyrical. Try a couple of freebies and see if Siberry's experiment works.

No direct downloads possible with this set-up, just visit the store

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Phree Phreakin' Phriday Returns: The Current (UPDATED 3/13/06)

I can't say it's perfect but Minnesota Public Radio's The Current is the best alternative station on the Minneapolis FM dial. And now they even have some free stuff. While it's a pretty stingy track per week, it is a free download... and there is a lot of other music content on the site, if you're into, you know... streaming. A good way to get onto other loci of artists doing free samples, anyway.

UPDATE 3/13/06

I received the following request via email this morning:

Hi there,

I’m the Director of Marketing at Quango Music Group and I’m writing because you have a free download link on your site for Bitter:Sweet’s single “The Mating Game”.

First, thank you so much for supporting the band and featuring them on your site. That link was originally intended for a specific promotion with The Current (Minnesota Public Radio) and our promotion with them is now over. We’d be grateful if you could now remove the link from your site, and link instead to their ecard so that your viewers can still preview the band’s music without necessarily downloading it.

Your support and cooperation is greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

Jared

Jared Barboza

Director of Marketing

Quango Music Group

Now I'd like to make a few comments about this. First, as it's noted in the FAQs, I am happy to honor any requests about the linking of content on this site from artists or their representatives. There are a lot of legal grey areas on the internet and at times I think that the intellectual exercise of debating their outcomes can distract us from more basic principles - like simply respecting productive artists. My email is in my profile. I will reproduce communications from requests to explain editing decisions that are motivated by outside input.

Second, take a look at how polite and friendly that letter is. I bet there are a lot of Directors of Marketing of Music Groups who could learn a thing or two from Jared Barboza about professional communications. That letter was so nice I couldn't wait to come over here and revise this post.

Finally, on a more personal note: Jared Barboza: Fantastic Name. You could do anything with a name like Jared Barboza. I mean, you could Direct Marketing at a Music Group sure, easy. But you could also pitch in The Show, or be an Ultimate Fighting Challenger, or the new up-and-coming hearthrob bad boy on the latest late-teen evening drama.

Here's that link - you can preview songs from Bitter:Sweet album The Mating Game (due out March 14) through a flash-based music player there. Check it out, it's really quite good.

Bitter:Sweet

And you can check out the new weekly download at the Current's website, first link above. The download links are midway down the page in the right-hand column

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Preserve Your Cylinder

Whenever I'd glance at that link for the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project I'd think it's something silly. Like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Oboes. No, it is in fact the CPDP of the University of California, Santa Barbara's library's Department of Special Collections. So there.

This is another case where any potential legal issue (remote though they seem) is set aside not out of any sound legal foundation, it's just ignored. Or at least if it was looked at at all, it wasn't talked about. Doesn't matter. The powers that be aren't really interested in this particular analog hole, I imagine.

Which is, I realize I didn't get around to explaining, an ongoing digitization of a major archival collection of cylinder recordings. The project summary mentions two primary donated collections comprised of 7200 cylinders but the total is comprised of several lesser contributions as well so who knows how much old (literal) wax these guys are sitting on. This is why the internet exists: as long as there is technological civilization these recordings will continue to exist, I suspect. The tracks are higher quality than you might imagine. I imagine this could be a deep resource for anyone needing a retro soundtrack or remix component. Head over to the Browse menu, it is easy to get lost in the collection of currently almost 6,000 tracks.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
12th St. Rag by the Imperial Marimba Band

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B-Lite, Blind Rapper

I could feel bad about putting B-Lite in a box, immediately relegating him to a specialty act: Blind Rapper. Except that the title on his home page reads "B-Lite, Blind Rapper," so to hell with it. B-Lite may not be for everyone. Imagine very white rapping combined with a strictly gangster lyrical sensibility. Actually, there's no reason to imagine, there are almost a dozen tracks available for free download.

B-Lite is crazy on drugs, and B-lite will break into your house and steal your fucking shit, okay? If it has not yet been made clear, B-Lite's music is profane, so use your context judgement. B-Lite's website looks, to be very frank, like it was designed by a blind person, and it is also totally awesome. Fear and respect B-Lite.

Scrivener downloaded... (please note PROFANE LYRICS and do read the download etiquette note)
B-Lites in the Neighborhood

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The Phree Musique Store

"This site contains the total output of Bob Chaos Records (1984-1988)

Bob Chaos Records is described as a "cassette only" record label based in Muncie Indiana, its 15 record catalog transferred in its entirety online, "instead of letting the tapes deteriorate in a mid-western closet. This is the sort of thing I can't resist. For a free and legal MP3 download site it's got a lot of content. Opinions may vary on whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Cheap Italian Sunglasses

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The Phree Musique Store

W-H-O-,-M-E-?

I happened upon Atalanta power trio Y-O-U's Please Rock site by way of the great Homestarrunner, where they are cited as the coauthors and coproducers of the Strong Bad Sings. So perhaps I was expecting something a little bit more weird on hand: what's available on the download, however, hews pretty closely to some sort of post-grunge hipster alternative rock standard. Which is not to say the music is bad: it's not. But I confess a nagging feeling that these fellas are capable of smashing up the frame they're currently constrained by and producing something a step beyond. I'll be keeping an eye on this one.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download notes)
LA Lindsay

There's a direct link to one song above - please remember to practice download etiquette and rather than just clicking on the link, right click + "save as" (Windows) or control+click and "Download Linked File" (Mac), which will reduce the artists' bandwidth demands. For other Y-O-U downloads go to the MEDIA page on their site and launch the Pleasrocker player under listen. You can skip ahed to other songs and their is a "download" button on the player. I find these kinds of contrivances unnecessarily complex but its their site. It still beats the hated MySpace.

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The Phree Musique Store

The Party Party

Mashups featuring exerpted audio from political speeches. There's been quite a bit of this kind of thing making the rounds the last few years. However, Rx, artist behind The Party Party has an exceptional talent for the cut 'n' paste. The content too is frequently not so much political as surreal. If there's a message it is more the underlying absurdity of political speech. There are some slight copyright questions, particularly when speeches are cut up to form lines from older popular songs... but I'm confident that if it came to the point the artist could defend himself in a court of law. Some swearing and use of other proscribed words.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Dick Is A Killer SERIOUSLY PROFANE LYRICS (plus it's a cheap shot but I couldn't resist).

Practice download etiquette: Rather than just clicking on MP3 links, please right click + "save as" (Windows) or control+click and "Download Linked File" (Mac). It will reduce the artists' bandwidth demands!

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The Phree Musique Store

"Brought to you as a broadcasting service of the Aoineko Online Community Outreach Initiative Resource" (what else?)

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what Aoineko is. An online art collective? The website of an individual artist, with certain aspirations of being a movement? The bio page lists a significant catalog of accomplishments but reveals nothing about the individual(s) behind the name. No matter. Computer generated video/graphics with the distinct flavor of anime. I recall the longish short movie Fragile Machine raised some noise in the geeky circles I skulk about online, which is probably how I got there originally. The movie's visuals and content appear to owe an artistic debt to seminal manga and animations like Ghost in the Shell. Like most photorealistic speculative art there is something distinctly creepy about many of the images.

But our concern is the downloads area, where a modest but interesting collection of MP3s are available. Some J-Pop ballad territory, though more electronic, vocal and atmospheric than the run of the mill.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Field Chorus

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The Phree Musique Store

I guess every phreaking blog should have a store

Look, it's another one of those wacky ClarisWorks Paint logos I find so satisfying to generate in the odd fifteen minutes. The Phree Musique Store

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Tuvan Throat Singing

Yon webbe is rife with this sort of thing, everybody's collection should feature some of the ol' short and obscure, I think. Also I like the name UBUWEB. It's just fun to say, try it. Anyway, Tuvan Throat Singing is just the tip of the iceberg (or perhaps some crumbling bit of its lower middle half... how come the tip always gets picked on, huh?). There is a ton of odd audio all over this site though, and I have much digging left to do there before I could tell you exactly what the unifying theme is. Or I could read their FAQs or something I guess, but what would be the fun in that?

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Borbannadir with finger strokes across lips

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Harvey Danger

Harvey Danger is a bigger deal than most of what I link to here, one of them serious mid-scale indie band type deals. More to the point, they decided to do an intentional experiment in releasing their most recent full length as a free download along side the conventional release, to see what it did for the sales. No word from their website as yet as to the results. But if you download it and dig it, please buy the album or make a contribution to them (see info on the download page on their site), as they are working musicians and taking a chance with this sort of distribution.

Scrivener downloaded... (please NOTE THESE ARE LARGE ZIP FILES and read the download note)
Little By Little by Harvey Danger

Download Note: a direct link doesn't work on this file, it looks like they have some sort of referrer jazz in place to prevent it, so if you want it go to the downloads page link above and look the options over. You can do a Bittorrent or a direct download, if you opt to the former you can even get it in OGG audio file format, if you happen to be an outrageous nerd.

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Who knows? Fleep.com

This is one of those where my central question is, is this legal? I mean, this thing has obviously been around forever, so if its egregiously breaking the law you'd think somebody would have done something about it by now. What the hell, sure, I'll download a 69.8 MB, hour and a quarter of "Deep House for lost souls" mix track. I'm on a gaping cable broadband pipe, it'll take me about 4 minutes, and I still have more than a dozen gigs left on the ol hard drive (man, my computer is almost obsolete). Fleep.

Scrivener downloaded... (please NOTE THIS IS AN ALMOST 70 MB FILE and read the download etiquette note)
7am Sessions

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The Mysterious Allure of Nintendo (continued)

Something about Nintendo above all other video gaming system seems to elicit a particular kind of musical attention. Behold, all the music from Super Mario World, done up with real instruments, weird vocals, and orchestration. Who is
XOC? While the cited page contains links to answer this question, I don't feel like following them at the moment so it must remain, within the confines of this posting, a mystery.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Super Mario World Title Screen

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Comatonse Recordings

Sporting one of the weirder interfaces out there (which is saying something), notable for a preponderance of kittens, Hello Kittyesque cartoons, and (most inexplicably) Holly Hobby, Comatonse Recordings describes iteself as "dedicated to the production and dissemination of non-categorical contemporary electronic music." Tons of free audio for the diggin'. Did I mention it was Japanese?

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Rain by Screech

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nanosounds.com, the tiniest corner of the phree musique web

What happens when you harness "cells and atom clusters to change the way digital music is manipulated" by applying "biotechnology... optics, information science and music composition and theory"? Well, if you take nanosounds.com to be your guide, you alternately get something like a beatnik throwing up in a goth's ambient lunchbox, or the soundtrack to to what sounds like a pretty good video game circa about 1986, or you get a 404. The latter is a bit of a cardinal sin in my book, but beggars can't be choosers.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Bicycle to Finland

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Hungarian Music Defies Clever Headlines

When I think of Hungary... yeah, that's it, I draw a complete blank. The very vaguest of visual ephemera, probably utterly generic Eastern European/Former Soviet Bloc scenery and costumery drecked out of the great common semiconsciousness of teevee, slip through my mind. I can say this though: Hungarian Music sounds precisely like I would expect it to sound. Bunches of music, of utterly questionable legal provenance, for some reason because it's Hungarian it just doesn't seem that relevant.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Felment az en rozsam Pestre

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NRK Urørt - Forsida

Where is it from? Is it legal? What exactly does "urørt" mean? Who cares. All you really need to know is that "Last ned" means "download." I suppose that menu section labled "FINN MUSIKK" probably means that NRK Urørt - Forsida is Finnish [NOTE, 2-27-08 - stupid American doesn't know what he's talking about, surprise. Please read the second comment below for an explanation of the site. Short version, it's Norwegian, and legal. Rock on, Kongeriket Norge!] But honestly: I don't even really know what that means. The last time I heard someone say "Finland" in any meaningful political context they were talking about World War II. But apparently they got some music, or rather musikk, going on.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
Touch the Sky by Fling... at least that's probably the title and artist, who knows, really. Because you need more tekno, I just know it.

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Alexander the Poet. Violating the Corpse of Irony

Some things seem to belong to another age. Some things seem to belong to an age that perhaps never really existed, when simplicity and nobility walked hand in hand in the childhood of humankind. Alexander the Poet, by contrast, exists in a more specific other age: 1983. From what I'm reading here, Alexander shaves his chest hair in the shape of a heart, dons leather trousers and doffs his shirt, and recites his original, suggestive poetry to a soundtrack of whale song, at "open mic nights... in the NJ/NYC area." I'm in a mean post-New Year mood, so this is what you get.

Scrivener downloaded... (please read the download etiquette note)
The Day I Spanked My Monkey

Practice download etiquette: Rather than just clicking on MP3 links, please right click + "save as" (Windows) or control+click and "Download Linked File" (Mac). It will reduce the artists' bandwidth demands!

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