Our esteemed #2 here at the site, Jason, posed a question to me awhile back. He had just bought an MP3 player and was busy ripping all of his CDs so they could be loaded onto the wonderful new gizmo.
He asked what software I use to rip my CDs. When I admitted that I hadn’t ripped anything for over 2 years he asked "so how do you fill up your shiny new MP3 player?"
What a great question! I figured it was interesting enough to warrant a short tour through my musical wanderings on the web.
A quick note before I begin. I don’t use any P2P software (such as Kazaa). I did for a brief time about 3 years ago but I got tired of it pretty quickly. I’m not enough of an audiophile to want access to the vast selection that is avaiable through such networks. And recent legal activities by the RIAA make it even less appealing. So everything mentioned below is available on the world wide web and (as far as I am able to determine) is all offered free for personal use.
So where to begin. Well, I started this little adventure when I stumbled across the Creative Commons website. Creative Commons (CC) is a great idea. A series of "copy-left" liscences. For those unfamiliar with the idea of copy-left and its value, I highly recommend watching the very well produced presentations on the CC website. Basically, a CC liscence allows artists a vehicle that allows them to distrubute their work with a much more liberal usage liscence than a traditional copyright.
So I began by browsing through the CC vault of content. Lots of stuff there, much of which isn’t worth its weight in electrons. But there are some gems. And browsing through the music section led me to Shannon Campbell, Scott Andrew, and Horton’s Choice. I also found some great repositories of freely usable music. Metafilter, IUMA, and Spewgrass all come to mind.
With these as starting points, the power of the web took over. Musicians tend to band together (if you will forgive the pun) and the Web offers a great tool for exactly that. Reading the blogs from Shannon and Scott I found Brad Sucks, MC Frontalot, and quite a few others. Each of those sites had a links page that had even more folks I hadn’t heard of. Most of these artists have another site in common. Songfight is a great place to find new musicians both good and bad.
Yesterday I spent time perusing Annie Lin, Lunkhead, and The John Benjamin Band. Each of those sites has a decent collection of artists links leading me in ever widening circles.
So there you have it. From a simple click of fate to all the music I could want in a few easy steps. While I hate to purchase music from traditional retailers, I have spent some money supporting the artists I’ve found on the web. Even in cases where the entire album is available free for download, I don’t mind sending $5 or $15 to someone when I know that almost all of that money is going towards the artist. Not only have I found a lot of exciting new music, I am happy knowing that I am helping (in my own small way) to shape a new economic model that I hope will gain in power as the next decade unfolds.
