|  Hooray Free Music!
Posted on Wednesday 5Oct05, at 11:52 pm. | | |
This week's entries have been a recent string of “aaaaw” comics. Not sure why Kyle is coming up with these, maybe to juxtapose the whole insanity that is normally in this comic.
Or maybe he just wanted to draw boobies, who knows.
I like to get word out about cool things. I am very much for the sharing of music amongst people (which is different from piracy, which would be just downloading music with no intent to buy). Harvey Danger has taken it upon themselves to put their recent album on a torrent at their website. The new album is very, very polished. It's sort reminds me of Ben Folds with a little more edge.
I like having the ability to share music and get people interested in bands that I am interested in. Give them a teaser, make them want to find the music. Which was why when I went out to find an album by The Dead 60s (whom I had seen frontlining for Garbage and put on a rather impressive show) I had to return the album.
Okay record labels, I understand, you dislike piracy. But frankly, when you make it so your albums can only be played on CD players and can only have a limited number of copies, that is limiting MY ability to enjoy your product. I returned their album, despite having really looked forward to hearing it. I am glad to know the indie crowd had taken it upon themselves to make up for the short sightedness of major labels.
I think artists should get all the money they deserve, absolutely. I buy albums. I don't consider a downloaded album a replacement for the real thing. Things like iTunes, which give you the ability to purchase single songs for a low price in order to sample music before you buy, is a wonderful idea.
Record companies blame the Napster generation for their loss of sales. Studies tend to go either way on this issue. Mostly the ones funded by the record labels are the ones that show them losing a shit load of money. I believe it was 60 minutes that presented the one report that showed that it took 1000 downloaded albums for them to lose the sale of one album. It's a small price to pay for the publicity you get by having those 999 potential buyers hear your music.
How about this as a concept: with the age of ease of information, people are now going to the internet to find new bands they never would have heard of before. I know it's happened to me several times. I sure as hell would have never heard of hell would never have heard of hellogoodbye without the internet.
While we are speaking of free music, I have to mention Last FM What's so cool about Last FM? You download a simple plugin that goes into your music listening program of choice (winamp, media player, iTunes, foobar, what have you) and it reports to the website what you have been listening to (signing up with the website and listening to music on an internet ready computer required of course). It all goes on in the background so you'll never notice. After you listen to enough music you can listen to your lastfm station, which will recommend you new music and let you listen to it, all for free. I have discovered great bands like Ratatat through this program. It's all very cool, and I highly recommend it.
Oh, for those interested in what I listen to, check out this.
Kite out. | |
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