Category Archives: Music

Trying to catch up on writing about music

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Albums I’ve enjoyed over the last couple of months include:

  • The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love
  • Robyn Hitchcock – Goodnight Oslo
  • …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – Century of Self
  • Beruit – March of the Zapotec and Realpeople Holland
  • Chris Difford – The Last Temptation of Chris
  • State Shirt – This is Old (available for free)
  • Nine Inch Nails/Jane’s Addiction/Street Sweeper – NINJA 2009 tour sampler (available for free)
  • Split Seconds – So Sad About it All (available for free)
  • The Hold Steady – Stay Positive (and in fact all their other albums too)
  • British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?
  • The Dada Weathermen – The Green Waltz (available for free)
  • Morrissey – Years of Refusal
  • ne:o – illoj (available for free)
  • No, Really – Rust (available for free)

I’d love to write about each one at some point, but I never seem to have the time.

Buying music in 2009

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A couple of things have changed about the way I buy music:

  • The iTunes store now sells DRM free music, so I can actually play everything I buy on all my computers and my iPod.
  • I’ve got a 50 songs a month eMusic subscription.

So my usual decision making process usually involves working out which would be the best value. iTunes sells by the song and by the album, while eMusic sells just by the song. This generally means that very long songs and albums with fewer tracks are better value on eMusic, while albums with lots of short songs are better value on iTunes. Of course, if the music is packaged in a pleasing way on CD, then I’ll buy the CD and pay more for it too, but I am quite picky about what I’ll buy physically because our house is getting quite cluttered and we’re running out of space. This year I’ve bought music via all three methods detailed above, and I think 2009 will be the year that I don’t have a consistent way of buying music.

Of course, there’s always Jamendo when money is tight.

Discovering Free Music

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So where do you start? There are obviously thousands of hours of recorded sound available legally for free, but it is quite easy to get lost, and to end up with a large amount of downloaded music that is not representative of what is out there.

These are the places I go when I want something new to listen to and don’t have any credits left on eMusic:

  • Last.fm have a page of freely available (but not always freely distributable) songs available at http://www.last.fm/home/freemp3s
  • For an example of a site that makes individual songs available in the “sampler” model, try http://www.jagjaguwar.com/mp3.php. I’ve bought a lot of music based on listening to things downloaded from here.
  • Jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com/en/albums) have a vast array of great music licensed under Creative Commons. They also have a lot of recordings that should probably have never been made. I spend a fair bit of time playing “spot the difference”.
  • The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/) has a lot of free music available, and if you look closely you’ll find live performances by some fairly major artists, as well as a few things also available on other sites mentioned above.
  • For an example of a net label that understands about free music you could do worse than try http://aaahh-records.net/. They released the Wind Whistles album last year which makes them great in my book.
  • For an example of a single-artist model of distribution, try http://www.joshwoodward.com/music/. I’d recommend almost anything on here really.

I’d like to recommend iTunes singles of the week, but they need to strip the DRM off first. Although I should say that I did buy something on iTunes this week which plays fine in Rhythmbox, so the claims of trying to make their music more accessible to non iTunes/iPod users are not just an empty promise.

Freely available albums of the year 2008

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As promised, a top 20 just including freely available music released under a Creative Commons license.

  1. The Wind Whistles – Window Sills
  2. Abscondo – Midnight Snow
  3. Girl Talk – Feed the Animals
  4. The Rest – Atlantis, Oh Our Saviour
  5. Robin Grey – Only the Missile
  6. Nine Inch Nails – The Slip
  7. Death by Panda – House Made of Glass
  8. Josh Woodward – Not Quite Connected
  9. Depressive Art - Bye Bye Dear Everything
  10. Robin Grey – I Love Leonard Cohen
  11. Josh Woodward - The Simple Life
  12. Brad Sucks – Out of It
  13. Icarus Crash – 13 Segundos de Caida Libre
  14. After The Ice – It Happens All The Time
  15. Mountain Mirrors – Dreadnought
  16. Death by Panda – One Fifteen Four
  17. Silence is Sexy – This Ain’t Hollywood
  18. Sungod Abscondo – Imperfect People
  19. Saint Jean – Zikophren
  20. Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I-IV

Albums of the year 2008

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As always, these are determined by number of plays per track, divided by number of tracks (with anything available for free hyperlinked).

  1. Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
  2. Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Sunday at Devil Dirt
  3. Elvis Costello & The Imposters – Momofuku
  4. The Gutter Twins – Saturnalia
  5. Jenny Lewis – Acid Tongue
  6. R.E.M – Accelerate
  7. The Charlatans – You Cross My Path
  8. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
  9. The Wind Whistles – Window Sills
  10. Okkervil River – The Stage Names
  11. Bob Mould – District Line
  12. Abscondo – Midnight Snow
  13. Mercury Rev – Snowflake Midnight
  14. Amanda Palmer – Who Killed Amanda Palmer?
  15. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
  16. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
  17. Black Francis – Svn Fngrs
  18. The Rest – Atlantis, Oh Our Saviour
  19. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!
  20. The Killers – Day and Age

    See also 2007 and 2006

    I’ll be doing a top 20 free/Creative Commons list later today (in theory).

    Introducing aaahh-records – home of free and charming music

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    I’ve just stumbled upon this net label, whilst trying to determine which year the Wind Whistles album was actually released in (the answer being 2007 and 2008 in different places).

    The label has so far only released three albums, but two of them happen to already be on my list of favourite freely available music for this year, which makes me think I’m likely to like anything they put out.

    Death by Panda – All the electronica you’ll ever need (and then some)

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    I’ve written about Death by Panda before (around the time I was listening to “House Made of Glass” on repeat). Since then there have been three further albums, all of which explore an area of music that can be disconcerting, but that does a damn fine job of sounding both computer-generated and very human.

    The new album is called Straight Lines in Subjectivity (direct download).

    An interesting find

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    I was going to write something about an album by a new British folk singer that I downloaded yesterday, but then tonight I stumbled upon a newer mini album and thought I should probably lump them both together as two records that anyone who likes folk music, music with lyrics, or just music should download and play to death. Robin Grey likes Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen a lot. He also knows how to write songs, carry a melody, and has a decent grasp of crafting unusual but still accessable lyrics. I’ve played “Only the Missile” a few times over the last 24 hours, but think that “I Love Leonard Cohen” (particularly the title track) shows even more promise, and certainly stands head and shoulders above certain other British singer-songwriters who get played on the radio a lot and have the first name James.

    I’ve also downloaded a fair amount of good music from emusic (Julain Cope, The Wedding Present, Okkervil River and I Am Kloot), but that will have to wait for another post.

    Music as product – where do we go from here?

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    I’m not sure whether music can be called as product. But what I do know is that I’m a consumer of music, and as a consumer I like to have some degree of choice over where I obtain music, what I pay for it (if anything), and what I can do with it once I own it.

    The main models of obtaining music are:

    1/ Going to a record shop and buying CDs or vinyl. I do this one very rarely, largely because it is usually the most expensive.

    2/ Buying the same records or CDs online (usually from Amazon). This was my main method of buying music until I ran out of space to store it.

    3/ Paying a set amount of money per album or per song to download DRM protected files (usually from iTunes in my case). It’s convenient, usually cheaper than buying a CD, but there are issues regarding what can and can’t be done with the music afterwards. I’ve bought a fair bit this way, but will probably not buy much more as my Mac (the only computer I use iTunes on) nears the end of it’s life.

    4/ As 3, but without the DRM. I’m currently trying out emusic.com as an alternative to iTunes, and they certainly have enough music I want to make my 2 week trial worthwhile and possibly to consider a subscription. The only downside is that you pay £10.99 a month whether you download songs or not. I don’t ever see myself not downloading music, but you never know.

    5/ As 3, but without the DRM or the cost. This covers sites like Jamendo, and artists who release on a “pay what you like” model. I’m a big fan of this, but not everyone I like does it, and I need more than this sometimes (although did download only free music for 2 months earlier this year and did not die or explode).

    6/ Peer-to-peer sharing of music files (or copying music for friends). It’s a valid option, but not something I do a great deal of in general or would like to condone too much.

    I’ve done all of these in the past, and I think a happy medium is probably the way forward. As is getting a very large hard drive to store music on before I actually run out of space. 160gb sounded like a lot 3 years ago, but if I continue to acquire digital music at the rate I am then I’ll run out of space in months rather than years.