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How Do You Find New Non-RIAA Music?
burgundysizzle writes "Given the general reaction to the RIAA in comments, I assume that there are a number of users that try not to buy from RIAA sources. What alternatives do you use - or more importantly - what methods do you use to discover alternative sources of music? I use Sellaband.com (some free legal music available) and Amiestreet.com (new music is free and most music really cheap) to find new music, but I'm always on the lookout for interesting sites to discover new music. Tell me about your experiences and any other interesting places you get new music from. I'm looking for inexpensive, and legal."
I use the site http://www.riaaradar.com./
It has a listing of many mainstream albums and shows whether or not they are published by the RIAA.
I usually look through their RIAA-free lists and see if there's anything I'm interested in.
when bands play in the local student bar. Usually indie labels, often burned copies so you know quite a lot of the money goes directly to the band.
last.fm
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
http://www.versionist.com/ - quite a big community creating reggae, mainly dub and thats where the quality is but also other sub genres. Website is quite horrible thou but the content is superb.
yush
I strongly recommend jamendo.com...there is a lot of good music (especially if you are a electronica/indie sound rock fan Its all 100% freely downloadable from .torrent or emule, and usually covered by some kind of permissive license (making it free beer and freedom).
The site was started by french people so a lot of the music is from french bands, however lately stuff is being submitted by people from all over the world.
A couple of good picks from jamendo: SGX - Synesthetic, White Light Riot - Atomism and of course the widely famous t r y ^ d.
Check it out!
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
I have found that archive.org has some pretty good live stuff, especially if you are looking for a particular song and honestly I like hearing the live recordings of people I have never heard of before. So i hit archive a pretty good bit. It was sad when a lot of the soundboards were pulled for some of the bigger bands (like the Dead etc), however a lot of smaller groups still release really good stuff. For the most part its archive for me, and some lastfm with the occasional visit to magnatune..
I listen to the chillout channel on di.fm - most of the artists are on small independent labels. But honestly, I would never set out to avoid music from companies who belong to RIAA (or CRIA up here in Canada - though all/most of the Canadian labels have quite that org), no matter how much I despise the tactics they employ. I just happen to like music that comes from small labels, and I wil lbuy and listen to music I like.
For me its sort of like Inbev or Constellation Brands - they own a lot of wine and beer companies, and while I am fairly anti-globalisation (especially where it concerns local craft products like wine and beer), if I like a beer or wine I wil ldrink it regardless of who owns the winery or brewery. Maybe I'll get more particular about this sort of thing one day. But not today.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
http://www.mcplusplus.com/downloads/
http://www.rhymetorrents.com/
http://www.frontalittle.com/index.php?page=songs&showall=yes
I like magnatune, lets you listen to the music with descent quality befor buying it (in vorbis/mp3/flac/wav) for a custom price of which 50% goes to the artist. You're also allowed to share the music with a couple of friends.
In terms of MP3's on my work PC, I usually go to Google and type things like "Beethoven mp3" or "Bach mp3" or "Chopin mp3" or the like. All of the recordings I've downloaded have been free. It is not that difficult to produce this stuff - all you need to make a Chopin mp3 is a piano, a microphone and someone who can play Chopin decently. Plenty of people can. Not all of it is amateur though, I've downloaded fine recordings from professional orchestras for free as well. One of the top Google links I get is Classical Cat - the free classical music "cat-alogue".
I listen to CBC Radio 3 (the Canadian equivalent to BBC Radio 6(uk), TripleJ (aus), and the NPR music shows).
Oh, and it's good.
http://radio3.cbc.ca/
Also found in the "Alternative" and "Public" directories of the iTunes 'radio' section tab.
I'm subscribed to a reasonable active mailing list for the type of music I like (characterized by words like: female, singer-songwriter, alternative, ethereal, celtic, eclectic, folk, americana - although obviously not all at the same time; think artists in the range of Björk, Sarah McLachlan, Loreena McKennit, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Cocteau Twins - although that pretty much exhausts the list of big names, and 95% of our conversation is about independent artists who (imo) sound far better than most of those, but whose names you'll never have heard of), where people constantly toss out new interesting names they've just discovered, and write about shows they attended. (The name of the mailinglist is ecto.)
CD Baby with its decent 2-minute samples and rather good "sounds like" comparisons is another way I've used to discover new music. All artists listed here are independent.
Opening acts at concerts of artists I already like also frequently turn out to be worthwhile in their own right. That's not a very swift way to get to know new artists, but it does add up over time.
Finally, every other year or so I get together (in the real world) with a group of people from the mailinglist, and we all bring the worthwhile CDs we've bought since the last such meet, which we play for each other throughout the day. We also make sampler CDs for each other, so we can all go back and re-listen to those things which caught our interest and remember "oh yeah, that sounded really good, I need to go and buy that".
http://www.garageband.com/
http://www.jamendo.com/
http://www.stage.fm/
http://magnatune.com/
http://www.soundclick.com/
http://www.myownmusic.de/
hand-picked from around 1000 at del.icio.us
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
If you're interested in high-quality music, check out http://www.jamendo.com/ . Tons of new stuff everyday, free with the option of donating to the bands, and it's all 200kbps in MP3 or 300 kbps in Ogg Vorbis. There's a wonderful flash-based player if you want it to stream, with playlist capabilities as well. All music is downloaded through BitTorrent or eMule, so it's superfast. Check it out!
opsound.org has indexes Creative Commons audio. Lots of good stuff.
I'm also going to shout out to anal0g.org and sudd.org
College radio is definitely a good way to go. It's independent music broadcast by independent means. Give WMBR a try. It's MIT's student station. A wide variety of great music broadcast by a mix of college-age nerds and members of the local community.
eMusic, definitely. For $15 a month I get to download 50 tracks from a huge selection of independent artists. The site is full of metadata that you can use to find new stuff (similar artists, lists compiled by other users, etc.), they run a great blog about new and interesting stuff called 17 dots, and they have download clients for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Amongst a lot of other good things (such as incremental backups of the worldwide web), archive.org also hosts a lot of music by various netlabels. This gives you access to much more good music than you're likely to have time to listen to, in a variety of genres. In particular, the chiptune inspired dance music of the label 8bitpeoples should go down well with the Slashdot crowd.
Why on earth has no one mentioned Pandora? There's a surprising amount of music on there that isn't part of a big name recording company. It does a damn good job of introducing you to music you actually *like*. Toss in something you already enjoy, RIAA affiliated or not, and it will start playing similar music. Note the stuff you like, and give it a pass through riaaradar. While it's not intentionally aiming for indie/non-RIAA music, it's definitely a solid way to get started. And from what I've found, it really can branch out into the fringes a bit.
That being said, this is obviously just my personal experience. It's entirely possible that my particular style of music (Metal & Industrial) has a better non-RIAA showing on Pandora. So I guess your mileage may vary.
--LordPixie
http://www.radioparadise.com/
Listener supported radio with no commercials. Not everything is non-riaa, but there is lots of excellent indie music to discover there.