Slashdot Mirror

Harvey Danger (Flagpole Sitta) released their album for a free download back in 2005. http://www.harveydanger.com/downloads/

I just don't want to - in any way, shape or form - support the dying record companies.

These jerks think they define popular culture. They don't.

DRM doesn't work. People steal the stuff before it's encoded with the DRM. The key is always distributed with the content or recoverable.

DRM can't work. Their attempts are hilarious. In order to be perceived by a human it has to be rendered in analog format, at which point capturing and encoding it in an open format is trivial in all cases.

DRM shouldn't work. If they won't sell me the content for the device I want to play it on when I want to play it where I want to play it, I'll convert it and to hell with what they think I should be allowed to do. Fair use.

DRM is a security risk. I will not surrender control of my PC to render your content.

The more they annoy people, the more visibility worthy indie acts get. People will listen to their popmart derivative garbage less.

I am personally opposed to straight pirating the stuff but I have to admit my conviction on the subject is wavering at this point.

Not sure how podcasts fit into the whole "Internet radio" thing, but Insomnia Radio is one I like. They don't necessarily avoid all things licensed, but they don't play any major label music at all. It looks like they have recently expanded into other countries (UK and Turkey come to mind, and Japan is coming soon).

The Insomnia Radio host posted a recent blog entry with regard to Internet radio and the whole SoundExchange thing.

There is legit free music on google too. My favourite is the album from Harvey Danger.

Creative Commons

Defective by Design's List of DRM-Free Music Sites

dmusic

Electronic Frontier Foundation List of "Artists Online"

emusic.com

Fading Ways Records

FreeCulture.org

harveydanger.com

Janis Ian.com

last.fm

Lime Light Radio

live365.com free downloads

MagnaTune

myspace.com

Nettwerk Download Store

R.evolution I.n P.rogress

RIAARadar.com

uncoolcentral.com

Vision Metal Records

I keep a list on my blog and welcome more suggestions.

Good point.

IANA(Russian)L but I can see that Russian law has evolved under much different circumstances than most western nations.

There are calls for Russia to tighten the law up before being admitted to the World Trade Organisation. Plus the ultimate sanction would be to block the site(s) at the ISP level I guess, although this would rapidly become a game of Tag, with the site changing it's address, then being blocked, changing... etc.

The main problem with most downloaded music like most CD sales is the percentage taken by the record company and all the middlemen. I would have thought that it was in the interests of the artists to get together and launch a site independently. It would not take many big names behind it to be successful - once they had completed their contracts with the record companies of course!

I am not up to speed on the production part of the music industry but there must be a performers union like there is for actors. They should organise something - prices could be cheaper than what the current online prices tend to be and the artists would still make more per sale.

I have downloaded the Harvey Danger album "Little by little" from their website and made a fair contribution. Maybe not everyone's choice of listening but a very good idea. http://harveydanger.com/

Just a thought.

In the tradition of taking obvious trolls seriously, here's my answer to you.

My business faces ruin. CD sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many CDs as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.

I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those boutique record stores that sell obscure, independent releases that no-one listens to, not even the people that buy them.

Well, let me help you out: you are facing banckrupty because you are, according to your own statement, selling CDs no one wants to listen to. Furthermore, many independent artists nowadays either give their music away freely to act as promotion, or simply sell directly to customers.

You can avoid this by either getting CDs people want to listen to, or, preferably, by getting out of the CD business completely and selling something else. CD business is becoming obsolete, buying from iTunes or downloading (legally distributed music) is simply a supreme way of getting music.

On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of music in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the music industry, from artists, to record companies to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike CDs, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.

Actually, it is a lot easier to copy books than music over the Internet, since even the whole Wheel of Time series (11+ books) is only 11MB as a PDF file.

No, the real reason why books sell better is that there are a lot of good books being written all the time, and you don't need to worry about a book containing rootkits or DRM crap.

For example, I just recently purchased several Pratchett's Discworld novels for 8 euros apiece, and have spent several enjoyable evenings reading each.

"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.

Throwing customers out propably won't help your sales any either.

I wanted to tell them the truth - it's because they wear old clothes and have cheap haircuts. I can't afford anything better for them right now.

I wear old clothes and a cheap haircut. Few people laugh at me. It's all about style - some people have it and some don't.

You just need to show your girls old episodes of Happy Days, and tell them to watch Fonzie closely. Learn from the master. You don't expect to become a martial arts master without training under some crazy old Japanese man, so why would you expect to have style without training under Fonzie ?

When my girls ask me questions like that, I feel like my heart is being wrenched out of my chest.

You might want to see a doctor about that.

But knowing that I'm doing the best I can to save my family and my business is some consolation.

Unfortunately, by this account, you are a lousy businessman.

Some people are offended by my blacklist system. I may have made my store less popular for pirates and sympathisers, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make to save my industry from destruction. I am inspired by artists such as Metallica that have taken a stand against the powerful pirate lobby. When everyone believes 2 + 2 = 5, to simply state the truth, that 2 + 2 = 4, is a courageous act.

Coming to think of it, I haven't heard a new song from Metallica for years, and had nearly forgotten they exist. That's the price of taking a stance against windmills, I guess. But no worries, I have lots of legally downloaded music - this album by Harvey Danger, for example.

If you're looking for other Slashdot advertized "free" music, check out Harvey Danger who had an article about them here last year. Their album is distributed via Bit Torrent.

How can you have "no hope" of defeating their lawyers in a crime that you didn't commit? If there was "no evidence" then you would have all sorts of legal avenues for reprisal, many of which could possibly lead to a large pot of gold.

The reality is that the RIAA has plenty of evidence that the people in question were distributing their copyrighted materials illegally. At the very least they know that someone at your computer was distributing the files. The RIAA certainly has enough evidence that if they were to call in the feds the agents could get a search warrant to seize your computer, search your house and start building a case. Most people, when confronted, wisely choose to take the RIAA up on its offer to settle out of court. They know they were distributing copyrighted material, and they likewise know that if the case became a criminal matter the feds would find enough evidence to put them in prison for a long time. Our current penalties for this sort of crime are ridiculously harsh. That doesn't make the person innocent, it just means that they aren't stupid.

As a practical matter this means that you shouldn't distribute copyrighte material. Heck, you can probably even download it, just don't distribute it (IANAL, and all that). Or perhaps you should simply stick to musicians that are happy to allow you to download their work. As a practical example I really enjoy Harvey Danger's new album, and it's available as a free download via bittorrent (they even have the music in ogg format).

Another Slashdot mentioned pop band came out with a download-for-free album about 8 months ago. http://www.harveydanger.com/ is worth checking out, you've got nothing to lose and I liked it so much I PayPal'ed them some money for the album.

You cannot buy culture

Last I checked, nothing in this world was free. You go to another country, and you have to pay their taxes, not to mention their airline fees (depending on which airline you choose, if you need to fly at all), and must meet any prerequisites for entering their country. Once you're there, do you just stand around gawking? Well, some people do, but everyone I know goes travelling to see the sights. That costs money. You can buy culture, or rather, you can buy the chance to experience a certain culture.

As for debate, I'd put more credibility in the parent poster's debating ability than yours, as you've just proven that you have no concept of the first rule of debating: attack the issue, not your opponent.

Now, whether or not music can be considered "culture" from a consumer standpoint, I'm not so sure. See, as I understand it, in many cases the artists themselves see little to no profit from CD sales and the like. Much of their revenue comes from touring and concerts, which I don't think are generally free anywhere in the world. And it's not like you can download an illegal copy of the concert and get the full experience of having been there.

The artists have their rights same as the rest of us to protect their works, but the fact of the matter is that many artists prefer to share their music for free, as it gets them publicity and good PR, which leads to a large fanbase and high concert attendance. The real aggressors here are the folks at the MPAA, who have, in the past, filed lawsuits against filesharers without even informing the bands they represent.

The MPAA has become a powerful middle-man entity, that, personally, I believe serves absolutely no purpose.

I call bullshit

http://harveydanger.com/downloads/

I had no idea who they were before I downloaded their free album, and now I have developed a bit of a liking for some of their songs, so I would consider buying the other albums or seeing them in concert.

Identifying the good songs is pretty easy these days if you use a little organization and seperate your stuff into different folders and use the right tools:

Folder 1) downloads: P2P clients, web site downloads, etc go here.

Folder 2) unzipped: where I unzip/unrar/unarchive files from folder 1. This is especially useful as I use Emule and usually just download entire albums/discographies (this seems to really cut down on falsely/poorly titled tracks and polluted files.)

Folder 3) tagged. I run MusicBrainz Tagger on the unzipped files and put them into this directory. The nice thing about MBTagger is that now all my files are consitantly sorted by band name and album name, and most of the relevant ID3 info is generally inserted. It does a really good job of automatically labeling most of my music. Then I go through the stuff that isn't automatically tagged and decide if it's worth giving the extra effort.

Within the tagged folder, I then look for subfolders which were obviously not the songs I intended to download (Generally this is just stray artists.) This usually means A)I downloaded something that was mislabeled or B)MBTagger got it wrong. These files usually get deleted as I don't care enough to put in the extra effort just to get a complete collection, unless it is actually a song I was really looking for.

Now, MusicBrainz does a fairly thorough job with western pop music and even modern indie, but is often quite lacking when it comes to tagging jazz, classical, and some ethnic musics (and of course the more obscure, the harder of a time it has.) If that is your cup of tea, you'll probably just have to do your stuff manually. That just is not the userbase of the software, so the database will not be as complete or thoroughly tested. This would probably be true of any similar software. Although the more independant low-profile stuff seems to be a lot more documented, meaning either A)consumers of pop-culture have no respect for music or B)indie fans are in it to impress people with their catalog, not for the music.

After all this, I finally just move everything over to my main media library, and go through the task of picking through duplicates. I just do a find on anything with the pattern (1) in the file name as incrementing copies are given that designation by MusicBrainz. I choose which one I want to keep manually in Windows Explorer, generally keeping the higher sampled quality version.

And finally, as I find files which are still messed up in some way (incomplete, taken from an obviously scratched CD, etc) I get rid of them, and decide whether or not to find a fresh copy.

This method generally seems to work pretty well, and is pretty much the only way I've been able to keep my music collection in any semblance of order (It was fairly manageable in the 1000 track range, but now I have over a month's worth of music (that's I could keep playing for a month, not I've been downloading for a month.)) And then when I find a band I really like, I'll try to go to their show if they come around, or buy a CD or other merchandise.

However it seems alot more likely for me to purchase a band's stuff if I can download music right from their website (Examples include Harvey Danger, Mellowdrone, McChris even though I don't know if they all still have their music for free download, Tortured Soul) than if I download it P2P. Although I have found some great music through P2P that I Probably would not have given a chance otherwise: Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Tindersticks, Tosca, Portishead, Stereolab, Zero 7, Rasputina, Cat Power, Shivaree, Modest Mouse, Ugly Casinova, and rediscovered bands that I forgot that I really like: They Might Be Giants, Violent Femmes, Dead Milkmen... unfortunately it has become a lot more difficult to

Speaking of Harvey Danger, they released their most recent CD for free (through both BitTorrent and http).

http://harveydanger.com/downloads/

It's a pretty good album, and I recommend it.

- Neil Wehneman

And if you like it, send a few bucks their way via their Donate page, or their Store.

And if you like it, send a few bucks their way via their Donate page, or their Store.

http://www.harveydanger.com/downloads/

Or you can listen to only free or shareware music like the latest Harvey Danger album. It's pretty catchy too, I don't know if it's hitting radio yet, but it should.

1) Buy directly from the artist at a show. I've been doing this more and more lately, but I live in Toronto and there's no shortage of excellent live music.

2) Download directly from the artists website. This is still a fairly new option. The Offspring and Rage Against The Machine are both on the right track, buyt not quite there. Harvey Danger, on the other hadn, have it figured out. I've never listened to them much before, but I downloaded the new album (after sending them a donation, I want them to succeed in their attempt to bypass the labels!) and I love it!

Mind you, neither of these options will score you the latest-greatest Ricky Martin or Britney Spears albums, but I suppose it's a resonable sacrifice :P

• The Decemberists {VERY highly recommended)
• Bloc Party
• Iron & Wine
• The Postal Service
• Fruit Bats
• Andrew Bird
• Los Straitjackets
• Neko Case
• Astaire
• Damien Rice
• Harvey Danger (in case you missed the story on them here a couple days back about them releasing their latest CD as a completely free download... OGG format and all!)

I bought said album at one of the local independent record stores here. As I'm paying I look over and who should I see but Sean Nelson, frontman of Harvey Danger. How cool is that?

Here's the Ogg Vorbis torrent.

Harvey_Danger-Little_by_Little.OGG.zip.torrent