STEAL THIS ALBUM
Apr. 19th, 2009 02:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogI don’t pimp sites very often, but this seems appropriate, given the previous post on record stores and what makes them special. Those of you who are interested in (1) discovering new bands and artists, (2) taking the time to hunt for them and (2) free, legal music downloads, you might try the Free Music Archive.
Set up by radio stations like WFMU, KEXP (Seattle) and KBOO (Portland OR), webcasters like DUBLAB (Los Angeles) and Halas Radio (Israel), netlabels (Comfort Stand), venues (ISSUE Project Room), and online collectives like CASH Music, it basically aggregates all of the music they’ve collected over the years – some of it John-Peel-style sessions, others just random recordings that are out of print or out of copyright. The copyrighted stuff is under a Creative Commons license, so as long as you don’t download songs to stick in a car commercial or something, yr free to use them as you like, to include making mixtapes.
The site itself is in beta mode, but it’s nicely organized – everything’s broken down by genre, and you can stream the songs in full to see if they’re worth downloading. (ATTENTION MAC USERS: It does seem to work better with Firefox than Safari.) You can also set up a profile to do things like set up playlists and do blog posts. One downside – downloading full albums and comps have to be done one one track at a time, which gets tedious. They’re reportedly working on that.
Anyway, it’s a perfect response to the current RIAA paradigm that digital music belongs to the record companies, not to you and not to the artists who made it. And it’s also quite fun to explore – which makes it the closest thing I’ve seen yet to a Web 2.0 version of the indie record store.
Fuck the RIAA,
This is dF
Set up by radio stations like WFMU, KEXP (Seattle) and KBOO (Portland OR), webcasters like DUBLAB (Los Angeles) and Halas Radio (Israel), netlabels (Comfort Stand), venues (ISSUE Project Room), and online collectives like CASH Music, it basically aggregates all of the music they’ve collected over the years – some of it John-Peel-style sessions, others just random recordings that are out of print or out of copyright. The copyrighted stuff is under a Creative Commons license, so as long as you don’t download songs to stick in a car commercial or something, yr free to use them as you like, to include making mixtapes.
The site itself is in beta mode, but it’s nicely organized – everything’s broken down by genre, and you can stream the songs in full to see if they’re worth downloading. (ATTENTION MAC USERS: It does seem to work better with Firefox than Safari.) You can also set up a profile to do things like set up playlists and do blog posts. One downside – downloading full albums and comps have to be done one one track at a time, which gets tedious. They’re reportedly working on that.
Anyway, it’s a perfect response to the current RIAA paradigm that digital music belongs to the record companies, not to you and not to the artists who made it. And it’s also quite fun to explore – which makes it the closest thing I’ve seen yet to a Web 2.0 version of the indie record store.
Fuck the RIAA,
This is dF
