30 Sites for Free Music

Mashable has listed 30 Sites for Free & Legal Music.

QTrax News (It's not that Good)

Article on Qtrax from ZDNet. Qtrax is a new music download service... "free and legal" music downloads. Sounds like the real story isn't quite as rosy. Google for Qtrax news and I'm sure you'll find lots of other info on it. Doesn't sound like it'll replace my bittorrent music acquisition system any time soon....

The PS3 Song

Very funny song about the PS3... "how you killed your brand". Lets just say it wasn't done by fans :) (I'm going to guess the XBox team had a hand in it, but that's just a theory)

Zune TV Spots

So what does anyone think of these Five Zune TV Spots? They are a bit reminiscent of the XBox 360 water balloon fight ads, all ending with "Find your audience".

Personally they are a miss for me. I honestly zone out because there's no focus or anything to draw me in or make me watch all the way to the money shot. Most of the commercials really have nothing to do with the player or any advantages it has. The first three basically are random shots of people socializing in a park, with some of them listening to generic looking mp3 players as a complete aside (to my eyes). The features that the Zune has that set it apart (large screen for video, wifi, landscape mode, comes in black, xbox integration, "social networking", etc) aren't mentioned, or highlighted. In fact, in watching the five spots, other than it's use for listening to music, I saw only one quick reference to watching videos (I think, it was a quick shot of someone turning it sideways, perhaps a reference to the landscape video mode) and perhaps a reference to the filesharing abilities by showing two zunes sitting beside each other.

The videos are very... "amateur looking". Not as if they weren't done professionally of course, but that stylized look. Definately focusing on the social aspects rather than the technology itself (maybe on purpose?).

Compare this to the iPod ads. They are a lot simpler, concentrating on the hardware itself and the enjoyment of music, or at least that's how I interpret it. Following the Apple simplistic style I particularily think that this U2 Video iPod ad is well done. A simple music video, and it just pulls out to show it's playing on an iPod, saying a lot.

Of course, I have a feeling most of the Zune marketing has been the grassroots kind that's over at ZuneInsider.

Anyway, I'm interested to hear what others think about the Zune marketing so far.

Songbird 0.2

The boys over at Songbirdsnest have released Songbird 0.2 onto the world. This is not the 0.02 release from last month.... nope, we dropped a whole zero! Songbird is a Firefox based music player/library/everything. From their page:

"It’s like taking iTunes, ripping out the music store, and replacing it with the rest of the internet."

Some would of course argue that the iTunes store is the best part of iTunes, and taking it out would be like saying "it's like a car, but you take out the engine and put in the whole rainforest!" (ok, so coming up with analogies on the fly isn't one of my strong suits :) Hit their screencast for a nice explanation of what's going on.

Speaking of the iTunes store, if the GNOME Music player Banshee has a plugin to allow you to access the iTunes music store, I'm sure that can be plugged into this app.

One thing that I'd like to know is can I sync podcasts to an iPod (or other music player) with it? I presume something like that will show up before release though, this is version 0.2 only of course. As far as the idea it's pretty cool, scraping for media, etc etc. Anyone using this yet?

Bowie vs Discovery Launch

Sometimes the most simple mashups are the best. Who'da'thunk that a simple meshing of David Bowie and a video of the Shuttle Launch would be so cool? Here's Discovery Oddity (David Bowie Meets the Discovery Launch).

Discovering Music You Like Found out about Discover Music - Pandora through Lifehacker (new must read blog I just discovered). I'm not sure exactly how it works, but basically you tell it a song or artist you like and it finds and then plays a song by that artist. You give a thumbs up or down as to if this is the type of music you like, and if plays music similar to that.

In my case I started with typing in "Blue Rodeo" as the band, it played "Bad Timing" as the example tune, and then from there played "I'm Over You" by Keith Whitley. Not exactly the same genre, but the same "sound". From there it went to "You Woke Up My Neighborhood" by Billy Bragg, who I've never heard of, but again, had the same sound.

I'm not sure if they use a similar system to audioscrobber for their data or what (it says it's part of the Music Genome Project). Seems to work well though.

Beethoven Symphonies Available in MP3 Format Cool, the BBC has released 5 of Beethoven's 9 symphonies (so far, all are planned) online as unemcombered mp3s. Very cool. Via BoingBoing.

Napster Free Music? Interesting post on how to use the napster 14 day free trial in combination with some winamp magic to get 20,160 minutes of potential music.

Napster Not So Good? A look at unsubscribing from napster and some of the suck associated with it. John has another post on the napster subscription service (the magic 8 ball knows all).

iPod Mini Ad This ad for the iPod mini is pretty nifty. It's a fan production that I have to say is pretty well done. Via nslog.

iTunes Music Store Comes To Canada Oh great, the iTunes Music Store (where you can buy legal (DRMed music online) is now available for canada. Glad to see we're no longer left out, which is good, but now I can spend money there, which is bad. Evil I say, Evil!

MC Hawking CD Available! Jeremy notes that the full and real MC Hawking CD is available! Very cool. Just as cool is the flash ad for it.

NickleBack Songs Re-hashed? Interesting... Fark pointed to this site which compares songs from Nickleback (a Canadian band, for those of you who've never heard of them) to see how close of a sound they have. You listen and decide.

Personally I still like both songs, so there :P

Mac MusicBrainz Apps Couple of apps for the mac which use the MusicBrainz for tagging their apps.

• iEatBrainz
• MP3Freaker

Thanks for the pointer from Etan.

Chill Out! The Kitten Video This is a bit (ok, very) odd.... it's a music video done in flash for Chill Out - Song by Youth Of Britain. Oh, and it's got a kitten. I blame Boone for it though.

Musical Relationships Boing Boing pointed to a site called Music Plasma, which is a nifty little flash app which creates a visual relationship between the artist of your choosing and others that are related. No idea where they are getting their information, but it's very similar to what AudioGalaxy (if you remember them) had, as well as various other services which have a "others who have listened to this music also enjoyed...." link. Seems like a great way of searching for new artists to listen to though! Now this just needs to get integrated into MusicBrainz :)

Check Your MP3 Quality EncSpot by GuerillaSoft is a nifty little windows app that will check the quality of a folder of mp3s and report back to you. Sounds like a good way to do spot checking for dups, select the higher quality file, etc.

Nelly Furtado's New Album Online In Full Maybe Nelly Furtado gets it as well. Her new album, Folklore is available online for your listening pleasure, before it's released. I'm sure it's out there in other forms as well, but they have struck a deal with the MTV folks and it's there for the world in Real format. I really enjoyed her first album, looking forward to listening to this one.

Funny Music by Jeffrey Hitchin Jeffrey Hitchin has some funny stuff. Only found his name and other music due to organizing my mp3s... great stuff.

New MusicBrainz Tagger (0.10.0) Released A new version of the MusicBrainz tagger is available for download (win32 version). This version fixes some bugs and adds a bunch of new features (a "saved" tab, ability to have a different filename mask for music by Various Artists...).

MusicBrainz is a tool that allows you to identify and tag mp3 and ogg files based on a generated ID, not relying on existing ID3 tags. So all that music you have that has tags that aren't necissarily accurate, pop them into the mb-tagger and let it go and figure out the correct tags for them, then let it save them into a nice directory structure for you.

On Filesharing and Artists Downhill Battle is a site dedicated to makeing people aware that when you buy a CD legitimately you are indirectly hurting the artists by supporting the RIAA, and so on and so forth. An interesting site, with some interesting flyers. I'm not sure if this is conspiracy theory or good sense. Is the push to "be legit" the RIAA trying to guilt people into giving them even more money and perpetuate their monopoly or the desire for honest people to get their music from legitimate sources, and not be pirates? What do you think?

Thoughts on Music My good buddy Bear has some good thoughts on music, online and offline, in his blog. Good stuff.

Free MP3 and WMAs Chris threw a link over to legal mp3 downloads a source of free mp3 and wma downloads.

Natalie Merchant Abandons the Music Recording Industry Apparently Natalie Merchant abandons the recording industry according to a blog entry over at BoingBoing.net. She's cutting the major labels go and promoting her new album (june! yay!) through her website. WhatdoIknow notes:

She isn’t turning to the internet as a backup vehicle, but as the vehicle to promote herself and sell her music. Where, I should add, she could easily earn just as much in revenue by selling a quarter (or even less) of the units she moved while under a commercial contract. The profit margin is that much better, if you have the know-how, the technology, and the drive.

Apparently she is also the first successful recording artist to deliberatly leave. Good for her, I've been a huge fan ever since Iambe introduced me to "Tiger Lily" ages ago.

RIAA Hacked (again) A kind soul on ARS this morning noted that the RIAA site had been hacked yet again.

hehehehehe

New Tunez I haven't been to MC Hawking's crib for a while, but it looks like he's got a couple of hot new tunez for your listening, and downloading pleasure.

Rolling Stone Also Gets It Seems a little magazine called Rolling Stone took a rather heavy handed (yay) shot at record execs in an ad in the New York Times.

The ad, titled "A Big Fat Thanks to Record Execs," reads, "Because of you, millions of kids will stop wasting time listening to new music and seeking out new bands. ...

Tom Petty Gets It According to a rolling stone article, Tom Petty Is Pissed, and rightly so. Coming on the heals of an interesting slashdot discussion on cd protection, I think this bears a little discussion.

My uncle doesn't agree that if you reduced the cost of CDs, you'd reduce the piracy. I say maybe yes, maybe no. You might not reduce the piracy, but you'd turn more profit from CDs I think. Right now I'm working for myself, doing the contract programming gig... money is tight. The decision on whether to buy (for example) the new Elvis CD (the 30 #1 hits one) would be a lot easier if the price wasn't over $20 (Canadian). See, if it cost, $3.00, or even $6, that's almost pocket change, and combined with what you can find in the couch, it's affordable. But with CD prices what they are, going in and buying more than two or three CDs is going to be a major purchase. When I filled in my collection of U2 CDs a while back I paid over $100 before I walked out of the store!

Anyway, I think that the opportunity to have consumers do impulse purchases would dramatically go up if CD costs went down. Then it would be worth it to them to just grab a CD instead of downloading from Kazaa or whatever. Of course, this leaves out the issue of buying a 12 track CD with two songs on it you want to hear, and the rest "filler" :)

Erhmm... anyway, Tom's got some good stuff to say about this, how he won't charge over $65 for a ticket to a concert (when he's being told he could charge $150), radio, and lots of other stuff. Kudos to Tig for pointing it all out.

XP Media Center and the RIAA? Neat article on winamp.com asking Is Microsoft trying to kiss the entertainment industry's ass just so they can monopolize the emerging digital entertainment marketplace also?

Good question.

How to screw the artist In the /. story about a k5 story on audiogalaxy, there's a good link to an atricle called Major Labels: the problem with music. It has a lot of the elements from Courtney Love does the Math article, with an interesting breakdown of the numbers at the bottom of the page.

How to Take down the Record Industry How to Take Down the Music Industry is an open letter to artists and musicians posted on k5.

Audiogalaxy Article There is a great article on k5 about Audiogalaxy and their little stint with the RIAA. I didn't realize that to comply with the 3000lb gorilla^w^wRIAA they have to block all songs, even the ones that have no copywrite violation, such as geeks in space, and pretty much anyone who is sharing their own music. So basically here is a great example of the RIAA fucking over everyone. Hope I don't sound too bitter :) AG is/was a great system.

High Quality Digital Music Collections I've had a fairly large mp3 collection for a while now, and it has been an interesting learning experience finding the tools that are needed to do quality checking, renaming, methods of file naming, and the whole works... in fact, I plan to write a little mini-howto someday about this all. What I'm wondering is how would one go about starting a digital music collection? Not collecting from the net, but from CD. Some fundamental choices have to be made right from the start, and I don't know the answers. IE: mp3 vs. ogg, high bitrate vs VBR, what encoder to use, etc etc. Any audiophiles out there that can throw advice out to the community?