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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.
You're actually going to pay for music?
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
Most of the new stuff I encounter is from places like SomaFM. Most (all?) of the stuff they play is from indie labels and unsigned bands, and I can listen passively, which means I get decent background tunes while I work, and if I hear something I like, I can take a look at my stream player to see who the artist is and investigate from there.
:)
Basically, I'm lazy, so why not let someone else send the music to me?
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 actually like to browse through friends lists of bands that I like on Myspace. Most of these bands are unsigned or indie acts. Chances are that the bigger bands I like have friends that are new bands that often fit into the sound of the "big" band. Not always just clones, either. While you come across some music that may not be what you look for, I have found numerous new acts that I really enjoy that I learned of only through Myspace. Of course, if I want to buy a full album I can look on iTunes to see if it's there. I haven't really tried the SnoCap (or some such name) service on myspace yet. The Plastic Constellations, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Lotus, Tal Wilkenfeld, The Bird and the Bee, Marjit Vinjerui and many others are artists I don't think I would have ever gotten through the mainstream, to name a few. If some of the these acts are RIAA, sorry on my part. Trolling the friends pages has really changed how I browse music, and it has done wonders in allowing me to find tiny acts that might never make "the radar."
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
/. led me to Jonathan Coulton whose quirky music I like very much, and who also responded to my email blindingly fast on the same day that a story about him appeared on /. - now he may not always reply quite so quickly but what are the odds I'd have been able to get a conversation going with a RIAA artist? Even some of the unknowns, who you'd think would be chomping at the bit to build a fanbase, seem quite aloof.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Listen to college radio stations, which is a whole lot easier now thanks to the internet. No, it's not all indie rock. Most stations have a wide variety of specialty shows, so you can become exposed to lesser known bands in nearly any genre--bluegrass, folk, country, j-pop, classical, avant garde/experimental, hip hop, dance, etc etc etc. And when their pledge drives come around, make a donation and support them!
This guy's the limit!
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..
Magnatune.com - check it out. I'm a fan of Roots Of Rebellion, Very Large Array & Rocket City Riot.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Can you think of anything that under-21s can do that's as effective?
Go to all ages shows. Even places that serve alcohol will put on earlier all ages shows if there's enough demand.
This guy's the limit!
If I don't like the politics from some party, coorporation, economical or religious group, I try to find a way to protest without affecting my life. Imagine if I would veto everything I dislike. I wouldn't drive a car (oil producing country often suck major dictatures), eat meat (poor cows), miss a manowar record (Riia), drink a beer (alcohol monopoly in sweden). etc...
But hey, don't let my rants discorage you to listen to what you want...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I just looked up Rage Against the Machine on RIAA Radar. Every album except one was released by a RIAA affiliate.
Hilarious.
I just started poking around http://www.projectplaylist.com/ Don't know yet if it's worth much or not, but it might be worth a try.
I hate to admit I use it at all, but the music on myspace has some okay stuff. Just poke around the bands' pages and see what you get. Find a local band you may or may not know and follow their "friends" links, especially some of the smaller show producers and such. If you like metal, start with http://www.myspace.com/coldethylmusic (shameless plug, my tattoo artist is the drummer).
These sites are essential to maintaining my indie cred. They aren't 100% RIAA-free, but they do skew quite heavily toward the independent side. Pitchfork is the biggest of these and IMO the best music publication in existence.
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/
http://cokemachineglow.com/
http://www.tinymixtapes.com/
http://remix.kwed.org/
Is great source for a lot of nice remixes of old C= 64 games.
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.
It's an understatement to call the Montreal scene great. It's certainly the best scene in Canada, and one of the top 5 in North America.
I have yet to find a station as good at introducing me to new music as WOXY. They started as a college radio station and made the jump to the internet a few years ago. They are constantly praised as being one of the best stations around, and I believe it. They still have DJs that select all the music they plan on their own, without any rules on what they must play. And the playlist is in constant rotation, with new bands being added all the time.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
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'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!
Yeah, move to a different country :)
From Denmark, legal drinking age is 18 (in bars, you can buy alcohol at the age of 15 in supermarkets), but if you don't drink we (the student bar) often allow minors in to see the music.
opsound.org has indexes Creative Commons audio. Lots of good stuff.
I'm also going to shout out to anal0g.org and sudd.org
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.
'Get the hell out of Fort Wayne' is sounding like a good plan.
I was literally just talking with my flatmate that was going on about how there's no non-drm music... there is and I buy it every week and know quite a few people (mostly djs though) that use it as one of the primary sources of music, along with the good old vinyl shops (like Know How in Camden).
Places like DjDownload.com, Beatport.com, Trackitdown.net etc. all offer unencombured 320kbit mp3s, and in some cases FLACs or plain old wavs. You simply cannot play stuff from iTunes or similar on a large soundsystem, you can hear the difference easily and it's not nice. These are niche sites for an audience of maybe a quater of a million or less people, but a lot of them care about sound quality, respect the artists enough not to pirate the music and best of all - the artists get a nice bug chunk unlike iTunes or large-corp record deals.
Dont get me wrong, iTunes is ok, but there have always been alternatives in niche areas and always will be. iTunes is good for finding new music and is gaining in popularity by individual artists and much smaller labels, but the majority of my stuff comes from these alternative retailers.
iTunes is the new boy here trying to be the alternative to the big highstreet retailer...
Hi,
My main sources for music are emusic.com which sells great independent artists for cheap and DRM free,
and some netlabels in particular thinner/autoplate http://www.thinner.cc/ that is simply amazing.
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.
This album is not affiliated with the RIAA ;)
... CD Baby is a huge collection of independent artists and most, if not all, have no affiliation with the RIAA.
/., MySpace has loads of indie artists too. It takes much more sifting through crap to find them than on CD Baby, but I've found so many fellow musicians both that I listen to and jam / collaborate with thanks to MySpace that I have a hard time hating it as much as most slashdotters do.
Now that that's out of the way
Also, as much as it's hated here on
And no, I will not let the politics affect my life in that way.
If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.--Samuel Adams
"I'm looking for inexpensive, and legal."
Sounds like my dating requirements.
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.
I'm a big fan of Pandora. You can type in a band name or song name that you like, and it'll start playing similar music. A lot of the music will come from non-mainstream bands.
No, I will not work for your startup
Many /. readers have already experienced the future of music distribution. Imagine a system where high quality digital music (in both lossless and lossy formats) could be found for all but the most obscure artists, and even many of them as well! All indexed and searchable by genre, likeness, etc.. All with download speeds high enough to max out whatever fat pipe to the nets you happened to be sitting on. That system was Oink.
I have subsequently gone to concerts, bought a fair bit of merchandise and even the occasional CD from the artists I discovered through Oink. I discovered a distressingly large proportion of my current playlist through Oink. I say distressingly because the fellow running Oink was located in a country with copyright laws as messed up as the U.S. (U.K) and he was shut down. Oink is now, sadly, dead.
Let me make this clear. Oink was not legit. However, it was *better* than any legit music store in existence, and not because it was free. If the labels could get their act together and offer a service like Oink for a monthly fee, I'd pay through the nose for it. However, the labels simply don't understand the new music consumer. We don't want to pay $10 per lossy album when we have digital players that would take in excess of $30000 to fill at those rates. Some of us (although certainly not all) want to be able to download high quality lossless tracks that are as good as physical CD's so we can enjoy them on high quality audio rigs. As for DRM, none of us want anything to do with that BS.
If the labels give us what we want and we'll gladly tithe 20, 30, 40 dollars a month of absolutely rock-steady continual income to them on perpetual basis. If they ignore us, we'll just wind up on Oink's successor, whenever one finally rises to dominance in the gaping hole formerly filled by Oink. Maybe it will be in a country where they can squish it, and maybe it won't. One thing is certain though, eventually the Oink model is going to take over. Having used it, I just can't imagine going back to the legitimate alternatives.