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Ideas for a Recording Industry Alternative?
icewalker asks: "There has been a lot of news (here, here, and here) lately about music, copy protection, and other related issues. What I find interesting is that there are literally thousands of free bands out there that are more than worthy of listening too. Free as in they have not sold their souls (not to mention music rights) away to the devils of the music industry. But how does one get to listen to these pioneers of music? The solution could be sites like mp3.com (until the mp3 royalties are forced). But what people want is a locals only site that streams, guess what, the music from free local bands only. Not just for your community but local bands from all over the US (and the world). We need a site that collects these bands and we need a streamer that plays them. No CARP royalty problems since these bands are unsigned and own the music themselves. Make it so that the artists can hopefully sell their own CD's or single songs from the same site. Anyway, mix and bake at multiple bit rates and you have a solution to the copy protected CD (I haven't bought one yet from an Indie Band). The big guys go down because they can't compete with free, better than great music on the web with a low cost distribution. So, where is this utopia? Oh! And dump the necessary registration required to listen (are you listening mp3.com?)."
mylocalbands.com is trying to do this.
In South Park, they said something to the effect of: "Even though some independent films are good, most of them are about gay cowboys eating pudding."
The same can be said about independent music. Actually, there is even more crappy music produced because it's so easy to create. What I need is someone I can trust to wade through the crap and find me the good stuff. Only problem is that I only trust myself.
Epitonic does this, they are free, have a portable music box that you can listen to from anywhere and lots of streaming stations that cater to any musical taste. And, most of the stuff is indie, as the big artists are probably not even allowed to use the service even if they wanted to.
This utopia exists.
It is called besonic.
It has been online for over two or three years (previously known as Riffage), and has a gigantic list of music online for free, as well as albums available for download from thousands (believe me, there are a lot) of bands from all over the world.
The great part about besonic is that just to be an Artist is free (you can post your own music completely free, charge euros - 'cause that's their currency - for albums, everything.) - the only thing that costs is the albums (that can also be sent in cd form to your home address) and a full artist service, with a custom web site and everything.
Can't believe nobody's heard of it here. Then again, I'm big on music and recording and everything...
Spaceman40
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
We have on of the best independant music stations here in Seattle. KEXP
http://www.kexp.org/
It originated in 1972 at the University of Washington. It is now in a partnership with the Experience Music Project, aka Paul Allen.
From their site:
"KEXP regularly programs an innovative, eclectic mix of alternative rock, hip hop, electronic, roots & blues, world & reggae, jazz, and more.
The station also offers a number of specialty shows that focus on particular styles of music, along with some public affairs programming on weekend mornings."
This isn't exactly what you are looking for, but it comes close. They have free player streaming formats, Real, Windows, MP3, and an extra bonus. Uncompressed audio at 1.4MBit/sec. They were the first station in the world to do this.
They have archived live performances, archived specialty shows, and complete real-time playlists.
Here is their current variety Top10:
Oct 28 - Nov 3, 2002
Artist- Title (Record Company)
1. Sigur Ros - ( ) (MCA)
2. Pete Krebs & the Gossamer Wings - I Know It By Heart (Cavity Search)
3. Jurassic 5 - Power in Numbers (Interscope)
4. Beck - Sea Change (DGC)
5. The Streets - Original Pirate Material (Vice)
6. Badly Drawn Boy - Have You Fed the Fish? (ARTISTdirect)
7. Mr. Lif - I Phantom (Definitive Jux)
8. Voyager One - Monster Zero (Loveless)
9. Royksopp - Melody A.M. (Astralwerks)
10. Doug Martsch - Now You Know (Warner Bros)
They do not have the ability for you to directly purchase the CD or download the song. I think the businees overhead to do this just doesn't make sense for a listener supported radio station.
HoG.
If you want the quality without going to the mainstream, you'd be best sticking to some of the leading lights of the indie scene. Bands such as Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Belle and Sebastian, Bright Eyes, The Faint, Flaming Lips, Interpol.. the list goes on. These bands all produce quality, innovative music on an independant budget and belong to independant labels.
There are a few diamonds in the rough of obscurity, but around 75% of the time, those bands are obscure because they're rubbish. The indie scene is built on word of mouth - if a band is good, they get a buzz. If nobody's talking about a certain band, most of the time they're either too new or just plain unremarkable.
See MEME INTERVIEW
Or WARD REVIEW
Ok that's in french so maybe WARD INTERVIEW would be better? (Scroll down for English)
Or hey just visit our site
Feel free to browse and if you have ideas for how we *could* place our music on the web cheaply and easily then please please let us know!! All help credited and appreciated!
Oh and feel free to buy a nice t-shirt.. they keep us releasing... ;-)
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
a great idea. also please be advised that some of the best rated college stations do webcasts as well.
(i guess my west coast prejudices are showing- i'm sure there's great ones on the east coast and midwest, etc as well)
No CARP royalty problems since these bands are unsigned and own the music themselves.
Really?
I know how to play a few instruments, I know some music theory, and I want to write some music, record it, and put it on the Internet, but I've run into one slight problem: How is it possible to write original music, when it's so hard to avoid accidentally re-inventing something you've heard ten years ago and losing a lawsuit? Especially when a large music publisher can take you down with just four notes?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sounds kindof like live365.com, doesn't it? The "DJ" streams a playlist of mp3s and the listeners can be from anywhere. Moreover, the popup playlist let you know what the song titles are, and you can click to buy. It even has a plethora of ads for those who don't pay and register. Only problem is they link to Amazon or something for all the songs, so you'd need to set up an indie site to link to for sales of these songs.
:)
A lot of radio stations seem to use live365 to do their streaming and also maintain a separate site (or just a frontend, like Fluffertrax.com
-Thorn
... of "tend to be" don't you understand?
He didn't say they ALL fit that bill, just most. I tend to agree. There are some diamonds out there, though.
One of my favorite independent bands that really deserves to be picked up is Virgos. They rock, they sound like a well-financed band, yet they have a unique sound, mostly thanks to the lead singer -- Brett Hestla (touring bassist for Creed, and producer of many CD's).
I'm trying to think of what I would compare them to, but I can't really come up with a good comparison... check 'em out.
"And like that
The problem described by the author of the thread is not easy to overcome.
The main problem, as many other posters have mentioned, is the cost related to distributing music over the net outside the traditional P2P type. Why?
- Bandwidth costs money. Even by todays standards, with only a few hundred thousand people using P2P, the cost would be astronomical. Not to mention if this turned into a main-stream thing.
- Royalties. Don't just laugh of it. The work of an artist is IP, like it or not. Besides, the creative minds need food too. Who is going to pay>
- Quality. No, I don't mean quality of the files, the technologial quality, but the recording quality. If it is free, who is going to pay for the studio time and the editing necessary. And no, you can't do it yourself unless you are a professional. It is difficukt and requires quite a bit of musical understanding and feeling and takes a LOT of time.
- Marketing. Who is going to pay for marketing, world wide exposure? If you want to get Joe Listener interested, you need marketing.
Bottom line, no matter what YOU think, it's all about money. The sooner you realize that, the better.
You can try to take on the recording industry, but it ain't going nowhere soon. No matter how 1337 on-line music sounds, it will not be reality for many years to come besides the feeble P2P sharing that already exists.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
The CBC (Canadian broadcasting corporation) runs a site call New Music Canada where hundreds of awesome canadian bands post their music. You can stream any bands songs and it usually contains links to where you can buy their cd's.
They also have top ten lists and various dj's that make their own program of tracks that you can stream.
http://www.newmusiccanada.com/
I run a site, OpeningBands.com, that seeks to promote local music like this.. The problem with streaming is that it's expensive, and somebody's got to pay for it...
So what do you do? Do you invoke "pay for play" where you have the bands in question give you a donation so you can afford the streaming?
I don't think banner ads are really making anyone enough revenue for this sort of thing, and banners don't show up on Winamp or Realplayer or other streaming stuff anyhow, so they'd only do any good on the website itself.
At least in my area, the people around here (primarily college students) don't seem too willing to shell out any sort of a subscription fee..
So, how do you pay for it then?
Right now we're providing exposure by reviewing their CDs and talking about them on our forums, as well as just providing a centralized place for everyone in the music scene around here to communicate. We also provide way more detailed concert listings than a huge site like Pollstar can do for this area - since there's lots of bars, bookstores, and other places that don't get listed...
We're hoping to eventually have [yourcity].openingbands.com websites, so if you like what you see, and you're interested, let me know.
In the meantime, we're looking for ways to raise money for streaming, but we're having trouble coming up with them...
http://www.babysmasher.com
http://www.openingbands.com
Although there are economic incentives to combine them, you can look at the problem of selling and distribution (how I get the music) separately from marketing (how I find out about it in the first place).
Right now, we get this information through a few fairly coarse channels, such as commercial media (e.g. advertising, genre radio stations), and our immediate influences (bands my friends listen to).
The desire for "local music" is just a special case of more fine-grained preferences. I'd like to buy music by bands that count Pink Floyd among their influences - whether or I'm downloading an MP3 from a garage band's Geocities home page or buying a CD from Sony's latest most-advertised darling is a separate issue.
So.. I'm all for a lot more metadata being available about music.
Michael
mp3.com (biggest >1.5 million tunes, now owned by Universal Vivendi who, so far, haven't messed it up too much)
IUMA (based in the USA, but international)
Besonic (based in Germany, but international)
mp3.de (based in Germany, but international)
Soundclick (based in the USA, but international)
(Garageband based in the USA, but international)
France mp3 (based in France)
Vitaminic (free + pay - based in the USA, but international)
Washington Post (yup, the newspaper)
Online Rock (based in the USA, but international)
Peoplesound based England
mp3.com Australia (not the same mp3.com - based in Australia, but international)
Emusic (pay and not really indie per se, but smaller label and re-release oriented, based in USA)
Artistlaunch (based in the USA, but international)
mp3 Poland - (Based in Poland - mostly domestic)
Good Google will searches turn up more small sites, thousands of independent artists' sites with free mp3's, some smaller labels that have free samples, many, many links pages. The biggest problem here is that it takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff. There is some incredibly good stuff out there and a lot of crap.
Use Google - many local newspaper sites have mp3 sections for local artists and there are many mp3 sites that are specifically for local talent.
If you're not familiar with mp3.com, it can be daunting in the sheer volume of material (no pun intended). And they accept material of all (musical) quality from absolute crap to incredibly good. They have many genre-based top-40 style charts and new-release charts. Walking through those is a natural first step. One concept they have that can be a big help is "stations" - really a euphemism for fan-generated lists of tunes by various artists. The tunes can be played separately or sequentially. So, when you find an artist that you like and get to their page, click on the "stations now playing" tab. On that page could be one to several "stations" where you might find additional good material that someone else has taken the time to comb out and list. I've seen lists from 2 to 200 tunes long - this can expand your options very quickly.
I have looked for ogg sources and found precious few. Unfortunately, Ogg is still a long way from critical mass.
Sigs are bad for your health.
Plenty of good free music from plenty of bands that are happy to let you listen.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
I think if you check your math, you will come up with the more reasonable figure: 5000 participants.
Peercast
I'm surprised noone has mentioned Peercast as a viable way of broadcasting music for free...I think that's one of the reasons that the peercast programmer made the program...
There are several P2P streaming solutions in development. My personal favourite is:
http://www.peercast.org/
It works quite well, considering it's only at version 0.116B, the developers say that it's going to be open sourced, and there is both a Windows and Linux version available now (Mac on the way).
Not a lot of music available yet, unless you're into Japanese Pop, computer game tunes, or speeches and debates from the EFF (the latter are quite good listening actually, keep it up whoever you are).
Each stream can have basic info about the "station" and a link to a web site. It works quite well on my 56K modem.
Skev