Myspace, Purevolume, Facebook applications, ilike, Last.fm, Skreemer, Songza, Hypem....yup, theres is no end to what time, fancy name, slogan or site you have to deal with in order for you to approach free legal attention worthy music downloads. At myspace one can spend days on following links amongst bands and friends, maybe finding good music yes, but interesting quality downloads? Rarely. The same goes for the rest of them.
An important thing to remember about most social network sites (whether they be music related or not), is that theyre driven by advertising and personal interests in commercial purposes (even from most bands point of view). So it is no wonder why these sites slowly evolve into hopeless digital deserts, highly infested with german emobands, crappy/unfriendly music players and dead end lofi downloads.
But, if youre keen on more, being simple (or just plain fox clever). Take the road less travelled. Think open source and embrace creative commons!. All you need, is to visit the open source audio department at archive.org, along knowing partially what you wanna look for. That, and some simple reading/searching skills. Let me show you what some concentrated 35 minutes of snoopin' around can do for you.
Seven New Songs of Mount Eerie (2004) - recorded for the July 2004 tour of Australia by Mount Eerie. They were recorded "Nowhere" in Anacortes, Washington in the months of May and June 2004. The release was in an edition of 196 CDRs and sold out on tour. Somehow people in North America found out about it and thought they really wanted it because of the low quantity. Now it is available forever for free. Besides this there are 11 other free Mount Eerie releases on archive, unique liveshows, private recordings, you name it.
FreeQuency - In Germany (and in german) Mr. Christian Grasse is doing his own podcasts, documentaing his search for neat new music, may it be indie, eletronic, punk, lofi or experimental. He regularly posts full podcasts under the name of FreeQuency. Though along that, posts individual tracks for download aswell. Tons of good stuff like Ghostape (CH), Cantaloup (DE), Resynthesize (US), Tone (DK) and heeps more cool unknown artists from all over the world.
Headphones Required - Headphones required is a weekly bilingual podcast from Montreal about independent quality music (post rock, indie rock, microsound, electro or pop). Filled to the brim with brilliant music ranging from unknown artists to stuff like Below the Sea (CA), Of Montreal (CA), Tortoise (US), The Brunettes (NZ), Akitakaya Tohyama & Kenji Ninuma, Fly Pan Am (CAN) and much more. Though the sets of podcasts are 128kbps encoded and dont include individual track downloads, it is still very much worth digging into.
By The End Of Tonight - A Houston mathrock quartet, uploaded some good quality live recordings from one of their liveshows At The Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco (2005). Viva Computer - a Tasmanian (yes down under) indieband uploaded 3 releases, their debut album "Viva Computer" included. Austrian Liger - and his archive pressence with "The infra-ordinary" album lead me further to the Beat Is Murder netlabel, with tons of more great albums to download freely. Cassettes - An anonymous soloartist, have a homemade noisy bedroom rock album entitled "Everything Is Chemicals" made entirely with Garageband and a three-string detuned guitar, that Black Reble Motorcycle Club, Sonic Youth and Pixies fans wont necessarily dislike..... Mogwai have maybe over 50 bootlegs floatin around.... Mono have a handful aswell......
Well , what im trying to say here. Why settle for the crowded, questionable and obvious, exclusively every day, when you can get all of this (and more) wrapped neatly in a minty breath of fresh air, "legally" along with.
Happy hunting.
PS: And may i remind you that Archive.org aint a dumb place to find uncopyrighted (or copyright expired) movies, commercials and animation either. (all the way from the beginning of the 1900's.:)
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