MP3 Blog Roundup

July 10, 2004 6:11 PM

MP3 Blog Roundup• A far-flung variety of free mp3 singles posted almost daily. Without Sense's roundup I would have never stumbled across the excellent Enchanted Sounds of the Islanders. Equally worth bookmarking: Fat Planet, NewFlux, Pop77, ScissorKick, TangMonkey, TtIKtDA, Tofu Hut, Cocaine Blunts & Hip-Hop Tapes, Music for Robots, Soul Sides, MoistWorks, A Million LoveSongs, Copy Right?, The Big Ticket, TalkieWalkie, Bubblegum Machine, Fingertips, #1 Songs in Heaven, Mythical Beast, Fruits of Chaos, Moebius Rex...
posted by dhoyt (43 comments total)

...and so on.

Do you have any favorites?

I realize the notion of an mp3-blog isn't exactly revolutionary, but I thought it would be fun to share a bunch of bookmarks among those of us who are always on the lookout for new music & quality reviews...
posted by dhoyt at 6:17 PM on July 10, 2004

[this is a freaking great post]
posted by rks404 at 6:31 PM on July 10, 2004

On second glance, I really should have categorized those links somehow rather than just posting a huge clump of urls, but in general they're all misc-rock, with a few hip-hop and soul (Soul Sides, #1 Songs in Heaven, Cocaine Blunts & Hip-Hop Tapes) and one Asian (Fruits of Chaos), and in general they're all really good.
posted by dhoyt at 6:43 PM on July 10, 2004

yay! thanks! (and i love bubblegum machine)
posted by amberglow at 6:43 PM on July 10, 2004

this is the motherlode !
posted by sgt.serenity at 6:45 PM on July 10, 2004

Don't forget 3Hive
posted by Hackworth at 6:52 PM on July 10, 2004

For command line lovers: MP3 Blogs and Wget
posted by will at 6:53 PM on July 10, 2004 [1 favorite]

Cool. Great post.
posted by Quartermass at 6:59 PM on July 10, 2004

Excellent post. Thanks.

May not fit your guidelines but my blogtathon entry from last year had some excellent mp3s donated by some of my favorite artists.
posted by dobbs at 7:13 PM on July 10, 2004

Yup, thanks!
posted by carter at 7:26 PM on July 10, 2004

A couple of my favorites:
Teaching The Indie Kids to Dance Again
The Suburbs Are Killing Us
posted by jazon at 7:30 PM on July 10, 2004

Awesome.
posted by eyeballkid at 7:42 PM on July 10, 2004

More listed at close your eyes, bloghorrea, thom and a real net music motherlode, dj martian.
posted by yonderboy at 10:36 PM on July 10, 2004

That these blogs exist supports my own approach to the mp3 controversy:

1) You hear a song you like, downloaded for free and hosted by someone with obvious passion for it

2) Curious, you read a bunch of reviews and maybe download a few more

3) You buy the album from the band's label's website

Result: try-before-you-buy works out perfectly for some people, the artists still get paid, and in the meantime I've passed along my love of the band via word-of-mouth to ten other friends who will hopefully buy the album too. This is an unnecessarily long way of saying: the RIAA doesn't seem to grasp that there are people out there who don't mind buying CDs as long as they know what they're getting first.
posted by dhoyt at 10:42 PM on July 10, 2004

Equally worth bookmarking... this thread. Muy gusto, dhoyt!
posted by moonbird at 10:43 PM on July 10, 2004

It would be cool if, instead of using wget like will's link (which I believe would just download the links and leave you with a folder-full of unknown mp3s), if you could publish music using an rss feed. That way you could see the image, read the review and then listen to the music. I know it would be hell on the upstream providers and there would be a lot of wasted downloads, but it would be a lot more convenient than checking a number of websites and right-clicking each song.

Does anyone know of a way to do something like this? I took a look at the RSS spec and it doesn't appear to support having any kind of file attachments. I'm reading up on the atom spec and I guess if you have the ability to do SOAP attachments you might be able to do it but I'm not sure.

I looked around at some of the links and noticed that scissorkick and 3hive had feeds, but it still leaves you needing to download or stream the files. Most of the other sites didn't even have a feed.

Any RSS or ATOM experts care to weigh in? The only other alternative that I can see is do some screen-scraping, but that would be far too much of a pain to be worth it.
posted by rks404 at 11:41 PM on July 10, 2004

ps - I forgot to mention that any of this would have to be enabled on the server side first.
posted by rks404 at 11:45 PM on July 10, 2004

Ooh-er!

Tangmonkey is aka Said the Gramophone, and it's my little online home. Every weekday since November, I've been posting the finest, most wonderful songs that I can find. Everything from indie rock to folk, hip-hop to classical. I do have feeds (here and here), for those who are interested. Recent posts include music by the Mountain Goats, MF Doom, the Arcade Fire, Taj Mahal, MF Doom and Arvo Pärt.

I say all this because I'd love for any of you to stop by.

Mp3blogs are this totally fantastic thing -- not only are they a source of free mp3s, they're insight into how people listen. You can read about the pleasure the blogger takes in a song, and the places that pleasure emerges from. Mp3blogs have helped me to understand - and to cherish - everything from Usher to New Order to the Velvet Underground. The enthusiasm of the best bloggers is completely contagious. The diversity of taste is inspiring, exciting. Find a blogger with an ear like your own and tune in daily for shots of musical delight; find a blogger with an ear different than your own and be inducted into a brave new world.

I'm overwhelmed when I think of the possibilities for mp3blogs: a Scandinavian typepad user who posts the newest cuts by Hedningarna and Värttina; a Mali woman on Movable Type, sharing her country's finest nobodies; a kid at Ibiza (on wordpress, of course), unleashing the fiercest freshest grime tracks. The possibilities are endless - you can explore, learn, sample and then (yes) buy. Across the planet, music-lovers who yearn to bring the world's best songs to your own little music-loving ears.
posted by Marquis at 12:24 AM on July 11, 2004

I sense the impending breaking of a butterfly on a wheel.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 3:37 AM on July 11, 2004

Paging loquacious...
posted by snarfodox at 4:25 AM on July 11, 2004

I love EmptyFree.com.
posted by soundofsuburbia at 5:42 AM on July 11, 2004

mr.marx has one as well, one that he should update more often...
posted by soundofsuburbia at 5:59 AM on July 11, 2004

>>RSS spec doesn't appear to support any kind of file attachments...

It actually does, and they're in wide use for exactly this purpose.

Here's a pointer to the relevant section of the spec.
posted by davewiner at 7:15 AM on July 11, 2004

Artists mentioned in the Wire
posted by richard m at 7:17 AM on July 11, 2004

largehearted boy
Coolfer
Mystery & Misery
posted by yerfatma at 8:31 AM on July 11, 2004

Summer Mixes
mixoftheweek
posted by yerfatma at 8:39 AM on July 11, 2004

davewiner - much thanks!

Jeez, I asked for an expert on RSS and I got the inventor of the spec. This is even better than AskMetafilter.
posted by rks404 at 9:10 AM on July 11, 2004

Is it some sort of rule that MP3 Bloggers don't support MP3 tags of any sort?

If I have to figure out what one more "Track 01" from "Artist" is, I will go mad.

Or is it a requirement to stay below the radar of the RIAA?
posted by milovoo at 9:29 AM on July 11, 2004

I think it's because the mp3s are often taken from band sites, so it's the bands that don't understand the importance of beautiful id3v2 tags.
posted by yerfatma at 9:35 AM on July 11, 2004

Great post. Thank you.
posted by synapse at 11:28 AM on July 11, 2004

Thanks for reading yerfatma!

milovoo, yerfatma is right. Just about 99% of the mp3s I link to (that bands and labels make available) do not have complete id3v2 information.

Here's a couple of my favorites:
Vinyl Mine
Lacunae
posted by jasonspaceman at 2:17 PM on July 11, 2004

Right now when I go to Mystery And Misery I get a message saying "This account has been disabled." I hope everything gets sorted out, Jason.
posted by perplexed at 2:41 PM on July 11, 2004

I was just about to say the same thing. Hope all is ok!
posted by Marquis at 3:04 PM on July 11, 2004

Best.. thread... EVAR
posted by chrid at 3:20 PM on July 11, 2004

Christ almighty. I just lost a day or so's worth of productivity. Thanks a lot.
posted by 40 Watt at 3:35 PM on July 11, 2004

What happens to good MeFi threads? They become news, of course; looks to have over 60 messages posted on the story.
posted by yonderboy at 4:12 PM on July 11, 2004

doh! No e-mails from my hosting company either, which ticks me off. Doubtful bandwidth is an issue either.
posted by jasonspaceman at 4:50 PM on July 11, 2004

Sorry to derail this thread but it looks like my hosting company (blogomania) is gone too. Anyone else know about this?
posted by jasonspaceman at 4:53 PM on July 11, 2004

forky's got them all down in this impressive mofi post/thread.

mr.marx has one as well, one that he should update more often...

I know. I will. *blush*
posted by mr.marx at 11:27 PM on July 11, 2004

Zong of the Week puts up a new quirky original song every week (I know these people). The current one is one of my all-time favorites by these folks.
posted by soyjoy at 9:48 AM on July 12, 2004

womenfolk
morrissey music
posted by mrgrimm at 1:26 PM on July 12, 2004

Lacunae is my recent favorite, and Lotsofco and Chromewaves, though not mp3 blogs specifically, post a couple of interesting tunes a week that are worth checking out.
posted by kickerofelves at 5:06 PM on July 12, 2004

Many of the blogs listed in this thread have their own syndicated feed and are aggregated at MP3Blogs Aggregator, which has its own feed as well.
posted by yonderboy at 1:08 PM on July 21, 2004