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I think I've got a couple Zer0 0ne tracks somewhere; I'll definitely give a listen.

Also, just in case you've missed them, try the older groups Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, and Medicine.

To be clear, these groups and the others I posted earlier are not PsyChill, being described instead as shoegazing or ambient, but most tend towards similar mindspaces.

Cheers,

I think I've got a couple Zer0 0ne tracks somewhere; I'll definitely give a listen.

Also, just in case you've missed them, try the older groups Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, and Medicine.

To be clear, these groups and the others I posted earlier are not PsyChill, being described instead as shoegazing or ambient, but most tend towards similar mindspaces.

Cheers,

Listening to the start of Lotwotl (and now downloading in a separate tab), I wonder if you've heard of Surrent / Banco de Gaia / Tomas Dvorak (damn /. for not allowing proper Unicode...) / Tortoise / Aerial M / Hobby (full disclosure -- Hobby is my brother) / etc...

Thanks to your link, I'm poking around the LastFM site, and am happily surprised to find almost all these groups listed.

In quite a different direction musically, there's the harder-to-find Swedish group Nordic. I've usually heard the term "power trio" used to refer to a bass and two guitars, or a bass, guitar, and drums; these guys have a nyckelharpa, cello, and mandolin.

Anyway, have fun!

Cheers,

Listening to the start of Lotwotl (and now downloading in a separate tab), I wonder if you've heard of Surrent / Banco de Gaia / Tomas Dvorak (damn /. for not allowing proper Unicode...) / Tortoise / Aerial M / Hobby (full disclosure -- Hobby is my brother) / etc...

Thanks to your link, I'm poking around the LastFM site, and am happily surprised to find almost all these groups listed.

In quite a different direction musically, there's the harder-to-find Swedish group Nordic. I've usually heard the term "power trio" used to refer to a bass and two guitars, or a bass, guitar, and drums; these guys have a nyckelharpa, cello, and mandolin.

Anyway, have fun!

Cheers,

Listening to the start of Lotwotl (and now downloading in a separate tab), I wonder if you've heard of Surrent / Banco de Gaia / Tomas Dvorak (damn /. for not allowing proper Unicode...) / Tortoise / Aerial M / Hobby (full disclosure -- Hobby is my brother) / etc...

Thanks to your link, I'm poking around the LastFM site, and am happily surprised to find almost all these groups listed.

In quite a different direction musically, there's the harder-to-find Swedish group Nordic. I've usually heard the term "power trio" used to refer to a bass and two guitars, or a bass, guitar, and drums; these guys have a nyckelharpa, cello, and mandolin.

Anyway, have fun!

Cheers,

Listening to the start of Lotwotl (and now downloading in a separate tab), I wonder if you've heard of Surrent / Banco de Gaia / Tomas Dvorak (damn /. for not allowing proper Unicode...) / Tortoise / Aerial M / Hobby (full disclosure -- Hobby is my brother) / etc...

Thanks to your link, I'm poking around the LastFM site, and am happily surprised to find almost all these groups listed.

In quite a different direction musically, there's the harder-to-find Swedish group Nordic. I've usually heard the term "power trio" used to refer to a bass and two guitars, or a bass, guitar, and drums; these guys have a nyckelharpa, cello, and mandolin.

Anyway, have fun!

Cheers,

Listening to the start of Lotwotl (and now downloading in a separate tab), I wonder if you've heard of Surrent / Banco de Gaia / Tomas Dvorak (damn /. for not allowing proper Unicode...) / Tortoise / Aerial M / Hobby (full disclosure -- Hobby is my brother) / etc...

Thanks to your link, I'm poking around the LastFM site, and am happily surprised to find almost all these groups listed.

In quite a different direction musically, there's the harder-to-find Swedish group Nordic. I've usually heard the term "power trio" used to refer to a bass and two guitars, or a bass, guitar, and drums; these guys have a nyckelharpa, cello, and mandolin.

Anyway, have fun!

Cheers,

Many people (including myself, hint hint) wish that their work was popular enough to show up on torrent networks.

You aren't anyone unless your stuff is available in a torrent.

I see your music is available for download on last.fm but I couldn't find you on Jamendo. If you want exposure I highly recommend setting up an account there. As a bonus, you can also take donations if people like your music.

Many people (including myself, hint hint) wish that their work was popular enough to show up on torrent networks.

You aren't anyone unless your stuff is available in a torrent.

They are really into this artist

Hahahaha. No, advertising still costs just as much. If you mean having a myspace page, then good luck. Join the millions of other bands no one gives a shit about, and who make zero income from music.

There are methods other than just myspace, you know...and many of them are relatively inexpensive. For example, submitting your music to podcasts is a GREAT way to get exposure. True, you won't get the same kind of exposure as you would with a big record label putting your ads up in a Best Buy, but you also get to own your music...and it's free. There are other methods as well. Flyers, message boards, passing out burned CDs at concerts. It takes more work, but there are other avenues besides record labels.

99.9999999999% of the music people listen to did not come from a bedroom studio. People like this myth of the lone genius producing wonderful music and sharing it in the wonderful new internet age. But.. it just doesn't happen.

That's funny, because that's what I do. I will be the first to admit that the kind of music I make isn't for everyone...it's a very small niche. But that's exactly why I do it...it's a small niche. I want more people to discover it, and that can't happen without more of it being available. My contribution to the ambient and drone scenes may be small...but it's still a contribution.

Commercial music takes work, time and money, and the people making nothing from it do not have the incentive or the time to produce the kind of music of the standard the majority want to hear. Pop music is an arms race, everyone trying to out do each other, and compete against 100 years of existing back catalogue of pop music. It's very very hard to do that while managing a 9-5 job or a family at the same time.

Those people you refer to at the beginning of your quote aren't the kind of listeners I'm talking about though. Commercial music doesn't make itself, this is true...but it's mostly recycled crap.

That's great, but who is listening?

Again, I don't do music professionally...I release it for free, and expect to make zero money out of it. I do it because I love it. If even just a single person hears it and enjoys it, that's good enough for me.

I could produce a thousand pictures a day, but I would not be an artist.

That depends on your definition of art.

Examine closely the music you like and that your friends like, and see how much was made on zero budget, and does not have any paid advertising or a record company behind it.

The vast majority of the music I listen to is made by either unsigned people making music literally out of their bedrooms or home studios (ambient, chiptunes, etc)...or, it has small labels behind it (dubstep, death metal/black metal, etc.)

My wife, on the other hand...can't really say the same for her :-) She's a mix between bands that everyone has heard of, and bands almost no one has heard of.

Agreed. I've always enjoyed making music, but I didn't start really trying to make it until recently. What got me into it is that I like a specific type of music (spacey ambient) that isn't easily found. A lot of the stuff I have found has either been released for free or I've found through bluemars.org. I wanted to give something back to the community, so I release my stuff for free. When I finally finish one of the three projects I'm currently working on, I'll make them available for purchase...but they will always still be legally available for free.

Getting paid for it would be nice, but I'm more concerned with people actually hearing it rather than paying for it...like you, I'm not trying to make a career out of it. I do it simply because I enjoy it.

That all depends on what you want to do with your music. The guy that lives on the first floor of our apartment complex is fairly popular locally, but at the moment he is just using the money he earns to save up for retirement. As for myself, I release all my music for free because it caters to a very small niche where there isn't too much available. I got started because I wanted to hear specific types of music, and was having a hard time actually finding it. Of course, now that I do it, I've come in contact with all kinds of people who make the same stuff...but I digress.

If you're good enough, your music alone will make you more popular. The Very Small, a band made up of people I went to middle and high school with, played at the 9:30 Club a couple of months ago (a place where people as big as Marylin Manson, John Mayer, Thievery Corporation, and Black Eyed Peas have played) They have also done a multi-coast tour, and are planning another one. Their advertising is done almost entirely through word-of-mouth and social networking sites.

It's hard, but if your music is actually good, it will eventually happen on its own.

If only there was a way that you could listen to a song before buying it, or read someone else's opinion about a movie before watching it. And if only there were free sources of music and movies to watch...

Just thinking about it gives me the Existential Blues.

I can explain why Zappa appeals to me, but first a slight bit of backstory:

For fun, I produce spacey, ambient tunes. Music like this involves layering textures together. What may sound like only one or two different noises is actually dozens of different synths and samples layered and mixed.

Zappa was a master of layers. The way he could combine seemingly infinite noises into one, cohesive texture was a monumental achievement. Beyond that, if you really listened hard to his music, that cohesive texture could be broken down to the point where you could hear the individual components that served as a foundation for the whole sound. Being able to create rich textures that are simultaneously seamless yet individualized is, from a musician's standpoint, a mindfuck of an accomplishment.

Zappa's appeal isn't in his sound so much as it is in his technique and sheer ability...at least for me. I find his work to be quite inspirational.

http://www.last.fm/music/Costanza/_/Just+Another+Alien

You're 'welcome' ;)

Not even to mine? http://last.fm/music/pojut ::sniff sniff:: You make me a sad panda. /shameless self promotion

Eh, I've gotten over it. I much prefer making music anyway...it's difficult to find the specific kind of music I want to listen to, so I figured making it would be the best solution. I played French Horn, Clarinet, and Piano when I was younger, plus I still have full retention of how to read music and the actual structure of music creation, so it didn't take much time or investment to get up and running.

It's served me well enough...I would love to write the scary short stories in my head, and I would love to draw the weird images in my head, but learning how to do either would detract from the time I spend making music. My interests are already too far-ranging, adding any form of creation other than music and the mild amount of writing I do would leave me with zero free time, I think.

But how are you sure that major music publishers don't own copyright in the musical work, the sequence of notes that you're recording?

If you mean myself specifically, that's easy: because I've never done any business with them. The genres I primarily work with (spacey ambient and drone) are such a niche interest that there is no way I could make a living off it...so instead of selling it and making a few dollars, I just give it all away for free. Most people don't really like that sort of stuff, and if I charged for it in any way it would reach even less people than it already does. My interest is getting people who enjoy these genres to hear my music...not to pay for it.

If you meant the general "you", I fail to see how a label could hold any form of ownership (legal or otherwise) over what someone has created entirely on their own.

My question is, what about someone like me who very rarely listens to anything that could be considered major label? Tool is about the biggest band I listen to, and everything drops off sharply from that point...most of my music comes from people like me, guys or gals just putting stuff together in their bedroom. All of the creativity, none of the money given to the RIAA.

It isn't creative commons-licensed (yet), but you can get all of my music for free on last.fm:

http://www.last.fm/music/pojut

You can also grab a couple tracks from my website for free: http://www.livingwithanerd.com/Music

Carlin reference?

You'll see him about the same time you see Jesus' Brother Bob

And Canada is.

I guess we won't ever see The Last Saskatchewan Pirate.

Keeping Squid alive is easy... make sure to feed it properly, meet the hardware requirements, ensure ample access to water, and follow basic care guidelines.

Don't abuse or torture your squid.

• LastFM
• Songkick
• tourfilter

I see the development of these services and other recommendation services as far more important and useful than marketing, so the recording industry really has few places to go. What I'd like to see them evolve into is a focus on artist support and development services, where the artists are their customers and they help them prosper artistically and financially. Theoretically this is already part of the service the recording industry provides, and perhaps this side of it will improve when the corrupting influences of distribution control and marketing fade. Many artists need someone to help them deal with finances, the stress of the job, set up collaborations and inspiring life experiences, etc. It is very valuable for everyone (fans, artists, etc) to let artists focus on what they do best. The real trick is to protect artists so that when they let someone manage the finances the accountants don't take all the money for themselves (i.e. the current situation).

ach, better yet; http://www.last.fm/music/Willi%2BBoskovsky%252FJohann%2BStrauss%2BOrchestra%2BOf%2BVienn/_/Strauss%2C+Johann+Ii%3A+Blue+Danube%2C+Op.+314

DVD set is a must (Ofcourse The various Kick's are needed but that is simple to get from the original disks or rom's.) Running all old code projects and to get at old content not available anymore because ooffice does not support Final writer and so on...

http://www.last.fm/music/16+Bit/INAXYCVGTGB :-)

Have you tried listening to different genres? I recommend "minimal" or "drone".

Try The Field for example.

I find it makes excellent ignorable but pleasant background music.

If that fails, there's always white noise.

Your boss obviously doesn't know what your job entails.

Depending on the nature of the office babble, it easily distracts or annoys. There's no need for that. I for example get work done faster and better if i have the correct music at hand. Its my `fallback attention to keep me in the pace and not get slowed down or distracted. Only about 1 out of 5 days i prefer silence.

And then there's times that i just put on music simply to act as static noise to help me concentrate. Often only after half an hour i notice that im listening to the same 13 second jazz loop.

Dwell trough some of my habbits at http://last.fm/user/Barryke2
When crafting code i listen to everything from Tchaikovsky to Rammstein to St. Germain, and try to avoid most popular music.

I'll keep the suggestions flowing: I love last.fm for its ability to help me find (and listen to) new music. It even offers a dedicated client that doesn't require an open browser window all day.

Really? You have at your place a popular radio which plays mostly Muse, The Beatles, Radiohead, Coldplay, The Killers, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Kings of Leon, Nirvana, Green Day, Pink Floyd...and so on? ( http://www.last.fm/charts/artist ) Now?

You know, there was an easy way you could make sure if what you're writing makes sense...

http://www.last.fm/charts

The most presented list, Weekly artist and track charts:
1. Muse
2. The Beatles
3. Radiohead
4. Coldplay
5. Lady GaGa
6. The Killers
7. Red Hot Chili Peppers
8. Metallica
9. Michael Jackson
10. Kings of Leon

Heck, even hyped artists and tracks (which simply show the increase in actual listening) seem passable...

I liked it more when you could specify two or three artists. That would give you a bit of more breadth on the pool of music to listen.

But you can:
http://www.last.fm/listen#pane=multiArtistTab

I agree, though, at some point it will either expand its scope, loop the playlist, or just stop (saying it ran out of appropriate stuff to stream). Frankly, though, if given a narrow topic (and a finite music library), what else could it do?

http://www.last.fm/charts

They have detailed week-by-week charts going back to 2005. Lady Gaga is in fifth place this week is at 1,923,168 plays by 92,208 listeners.

Muse, The Beatles, Radiohead, and Coldplay precede her, but that's likely due to the fact that Last.fm is based in the UK and the majority of their users from the UK* and that those bands are much much better :) What do you call someone from the UK? I wanted to say British but that excludes Northern Ireland.

Last.fm has streamed 275,000 years of audio around the world.

I'd love to know how much of that was stuff like Britney Spears

56,904,147 plays (1,246,583 listeners)

Last.fm's "neighbor" system works similarly, except it looks at what each person listens to. Keep in mind that it takes a fair bit of training to find neighbors who are actually close to your likes, but once you've listened to enough music, it's pretty good at finding things I like but have never heard of. I.E. if I like song A B C and D, and you like song A, B and C, you might like song D.

The neighbor system groups people with similar musical tastes, and allows each person to tune to his/her "Neighbor Radio", to listen to songs liked by your neighbors.

(Disclaimer: I have no vested interest in last.fm besides being a paid member. [My Profile])

Let's face it, by then the shit will have hit the fan. Mankind will have been put under its own boot, with either one of two situations occuring: Men ruled by man or man ruled by men. Neither world is acceptable to me, not like this one is a model existence either.

I'd put on my headband, boots, camo pants, and grab whatever black market guns I could find (by then guns will be outlawed so we can become more in-line with the more "progressive" nations) and maybe grenade or two. I'd light a cigarette to go with my 5 o'clock shadow, strap on a bullet belt, and teach any of the dogs responsible for this mess, including those that tried to stop me, what the inside of hell looks like, all while Foetus's Anything (Viva!) played in the background. Rule of law? I'll show you Newton's first law: my bullet will hit their heads which will cause their brains to spray out.

There's no coping in my world. Only the blood of those responsible for this mess. Everywhere.

There are many music download and music access services available. Just go elsewhere. Like so many "firsts" on the Net - e.g. eBay, Yahoo, etc. - iTunes seems old in the tooth. Couple that with egregious DRM policies and attempts to choke interoperability. Why bother. I like Apple products, but who really needs iTunes for music. Other than as a software platform for playback, I could care less about the iTunes music store. Try these: http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?ie=UTF8&node=163856011 http://pandora.com/ http://www.emusic.com/ http://www.slacker.com/ http://www.napster.com/ http://music.myspace.com/ www.youtube.com http://www.rhapsody.com/home.html http://www.walmart.com/music http://www.last.fm/ http://social.zune.net/music/ http://www.seeqpod.com/

I'm a UK musician and don't support this. Also, people can legally download everything I do for free, if they want (big if).

But people should listen to more totally free music, eg like this guy who is really talented http://www.last.fm/music/Marc+A.+Pullen/ and not big labeled crap like "Lily Allen".

Wrong. The only true Gods of electronic music are Infected Mushroom

Name me ONE FUCKING ARTIST who started out with 100% original music.

My first thought is Afterlives - http://www.last.fm/music/Afterlives

"William Barrett, the musician behind this sometimes dreamy, sometimes jarring collection of songs, had recorded no previous work. In fact, he had never written anything else, never played music. He simply decided to record an album one day, and did it. He had no preconceptions, no precedent. He just did it."

How about a list of more apps?

• Calibre ebook manager
• Last.fm streaming music client
• VLC media player
• CDex CD ripping software
• MusicBrainz Picard for tagging audio files
• Pidgin IM client
• OpenPandora to put Pandora on your desktop and scrobble to Last.fm
• VirtualDub for simple video editing

Anyone else have any good recommendations?

As an additional note, if you're reluctant for whatever reason to download, you can stream/preview at Last.fm and/or check out the theatrical trailer over on Youtube.

Our torrent tracker is indeed experiencing some load issues but we're working on getting the MP3s up in a single zip mediaupload/rapidshare fashion shortly, and individual MP3s are of course available at the site. The full torrent does include FLAC.

If running the site for almost ten years has told me one thing, it's that you can't please all the people all the time, but from a genre perspective at least this album features electronica, rock, orchestral, jazz, and much more. If Final Fantasy isn't your thing, please do check out the rest of our albums and individual mixes!

And, as a random side note, I administer/develop the site, it's LAMP, and I use Eclipse/PDT for all development and the Oxygen XML editor plugin for XSLT, which drives the frontend templating outside the wiki and forums. You know, just in case any one was wondering...

That's pretty much Last.FM except you can't specify playlists unless you pay for it. You can however type in a search for a specific type of music and it will do tag comparisons for similar music and you can essentially do the same thing (with links.)

For instance: http://www.last.fm/listen/globaltags/atmospheric <- There you go... a channel dedicated to just atmospheric music.

I can proudly say that if i google my full name it yields 0 results. How many of you can say that??

I'm not going to spend the time deep-diving on this one, but you're being a little overconfident, I think. Here's just a guess about you:

• You use Ubuntu
• You like Joan Baez
• You have an LG e500 laptop,
• You're uploaded some torrents to Minonova
• You might live in Virginia or Ohio, or maybe Georgia

OTOH, Last.fm clients are available for most popular media players on Linux (Amarok & RhythmBox, for example).

Pandora's main competition for mindshare is Last.FM. There's also a bit of a US/EU rivalry, with Pandora so strongly identified with the US and, with the Valley in particular, while Last.FM came out of a Euro milieu. I think I've noticed a very pro-Pandora coverage pattern at TechCrunch. Lots of the "Web 2 - Me Too" AdSense spam sites, sorry, gadget/tech blogs, take cues from TechCrunch, and among the iPhone-toting, US-centric crowd, Pandora is a darling.

Before I'd believe anything TechCrunch said about Last.FM, I'd want to know more about the personal and financial connections between the people running TechCrunch and the people running Pandora.

Personally, I've tried Pandora every years and it fails, epically, to even know about many of the artists I am interested in hearing. Plus, Pandora's Flash interface is just aggravating, user-hostile, and screams hipster-designer-marketroid-douchbags-in-control.

Not at all. I am fully confident that Techcrunch are full of shit.