Billy Faier got tired of burning copies of his long-out-of-print albums, and is giving them away: The Art of the Five String Banjo (1957), Travelin' Man (1958), The Beast of Billy Faier (1964), Banjo (1973) and Banjoes, Birdsong and Mother Earth (1987). [more inside]
posted by scruss on Jun 28, 2009 - 13 comments

Pilgrim Productions Presents: Voices Across America, an archive of gospel music in a variety of genres, submitted for free play and download by church groups and folk and traditional groups across the country and beyond. Style, age, and quality vary greatly, but fans of noncommercial music will enjoy hunting for the gems of blues, Cajun, bluegrass, choral, shapenote, country, vintage, and mountain gospel and more.
posted by Miko on May 24, 2009 - 15 comments

StarshipSofa has podcasted all of the Nebula Best Short Story Nominees for 2008, following on from podcasting all but one of the 2008 BSFA short story nominees. Previous StarshipSofa.
posted by Artw on Apr 2, 2009 - 12 comments

Four Hours of Free Funkiness Filter: Pretty Lights [more inside]
posted by jammy on Mar 31, 2009 - 20 comments

Sennheiser, a family-run company with an interesting history of searching for audiophile quality, has created what it boasts as "the new standard for audiophile headphones." But will it matter in the long run, when the next generation of listeners enjoys the "sizzle sound" associated with lower bitrate MP3s? (via) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Mar 16, 2009 - 118 comments

For the fourteenth year, Yo La Tengo will murder the classics tonight. (Previously: 2002 2006 2007 2008) [more inside]
posted by roll truck roll on Mar 13, 2009 - 61 comments

The niftiest thing at Coin Op World? The mp3 files of Classic Arcade Sounds. [more inside]
posted by Miko on Mar 13, 2009 - 27 comments

The Folkways Collection is a downloadable, 24-part podcast series that "explores the remarkable collection of music, spoken word, and sound recordings that make up Folkways Records (now at the Smithsonian as Smithsonian Folkways Recordings)."
posted by Miko on Feb 16, 2009 - 27 comments

Alec Duffy won all rights to Sufjan Stevens' song "Lonely Man of Winter" in a contest (traded for the rights to his winning song). Rather than sell or blog it, he's having private listening parties with a handful of guests each Wednesday night in Brooklyn through Feb. 25th. Here's why. You can hear his winning entry, the vaguely Magnetic-Fieldsy Every Day Is Christmas, but so far, he has kept Stevens' song offline. Some people are angry about these "little asshat tea parties." The closest most of us can get are listener descriptions from Annie Scott ("lovely"), and Jessica Suarez ("gorgeous"). [more inside]
posted by msalt on Feb 9, 2009 - 94 comments

Your favorite music blog sucks.

Rock/Psych/Prog/Indie/Folk
ChrisGoesRock
Prog Not Frog
Like Dynamite to your Brain
YoungMossTongue
Glamorous Indie Rock'n'Roll
FANTASY
SONZEIRANANET
A L A I N F I N K I E L K R A U T R O C K
Orexis Of Death
[more inside]
posted by swift on Jan 19, 2009 - 55 comments

“You can’t roll a joint on an iPod” or how the iPod killed the music industry. First the music biz overlooked the computer CD rom when they put copy control on cd burners. Then they eliminated the single. Shortly after that "mp3" replaced "sex" as the most popular search term. Apple has become the largest music seller largely against the wishes of the music biz, but 99 cents beats free. Yesterday Apple announced they were eliminating DRM. The questions remains, who needs Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, and EMI, does Apple? When is Apple just going to replace them? There were rumors a year ago that they would launch a record label with Jay-Z but that does not appear to have come to fruition.
posted by caddis on Jan 7, 2009 - 105 comments

In the 1980s, songwriter, artist and cultural critic Momus recorded a number of albums for the legendary indie label Creation Records, combining influences as diverse as Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg, Pet Shop Boys-style synthpop and Balearic acid-house. These have largely languished in Sony Music's vaults over the past few years, occasionally fetching hefty prices on eBay. Now, Momus has taken the step to commit auto-piracy and release his Creation albums online, for free; over December, he will post MP3s of all six albums to his LiveJournal blog, each with freshly written liner notes. The first one, 1987's The Poison Boyfriend, is here. [more inside]
posted by acb on Dec 9, 2008 - 15 comments

CLLCT - The Collective Family An online community of indipendent musicians who have made their music free to download. No, it's not myspace. [more inside]
posted by robotot on Dec 1, 2008 - 21 comments

What does it all mean? In many ways, today's remix culture kicked off in earnest one weekend in 1983 when two ad men (one a recording engineer) spent a weekend in a studio crafting the first pop record made up entirely of samples in the hopes of winning a $100 remix contest. [more inside]
posted by 2or3whiskeysodas on Nov 9, 2008 - 20 comments

Something to make the inner geek that is inside your inner geek do the boogie-woogie: "Weird Al" Yankovic announces that thanks to digital distribution, he will begin releasing songs as he records them, while the parodied song is still fresh in the public's mind, instead of waiting for an album release every three to four years. The first one will come out on October 7. iTunes will have first dibs on the new singles for the first 14 days, after which they'll go to other online music retailers. (via /.)
posted by WCityMike on Oct 3, 2008 - 73 comments

"So, that’s my long and winding history of a little postcard from the Upper West Side of Manhattan!" Suzanne Vega writes about writing the hit song Tom's Diner, coping with its numerous remixes, and its part in the birth of the MP3 music compression format.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Sep 24, 2008 - 34 comments

Have you ever wondered what the national anthem of Bolivia, Nepal or The Republic of Seychelles sounded like? Well wonder no more because NationalAnthems.info has got you covered! It claims to have the national anthem for every country in the world in MIDI format, along with downloadable lyrics and sheet music so you can sing and play along. But if the MIDI format isn't doing it for you, there's also other sites that you can visit that have downloadable MP3s of pretty much every national anthem this planet and its inhabitants have to offer, such as this one or this one, which is notable in that the anthems featured there were performed by the US Navy Band. And finally, for your further reading and listening pleasure, check out this forum which contains background information on and even more links to downloadable national anthems.
posted by Effigy2000 on Sep 22, 2008 - 14 comments

Postcard.fm Send audio postcards to your friends. Free. Upload any photo of yours or image off the web and any MP3 you choose in a single upload process, then enter your email address and that of the person to whom you wish to send the mix. Done— it’s simple. p.s. postcard does not sell, spam, or share the email addresses of senders or recipients. via
posted by nickyskye on Sep 21, 2008 - 10 comments

Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is in Another Castle. John Darnielle (of the Mountain Goats) and Kaki King perform a song, sung from the point of view of Toad from the Super Mario Brothers video game franchise.
posted by PM on Sep 11, 2008 - 59 comments

A lifetime of lost playlists Martin Belam offers a personal history of music formats and describing how he made playlists with each of them. I'd love for his conclusion to become a reality.
posted by feelinglistless on Jul 31, 2008 - 13 comments

The following is a list of over 3600 titles recorded from my collection of 78 rpm records....Right now, there are over 2,450 titles on this page linked to mp3's....I have about 2500 more records to record, so I'll be adding more titles as time permits over the next hundred years or so....I loaded a searchable ACCESS database for this list HERE. [.mdb] I don't know if it will work for everyone. Good luck! [more inside]
posted by carsonb on Jul 24, 2008 - 84 comments

Ren + Stimpy Production Music: 109 Instrumental Tracks!
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Jul 24, 2008 - 38 comments

toneshared is a library of free mobile phone ringtones made by electronica/alternative musicians. From the subtle to the mashed to the downright annoying.
posted by nthdegx on Jun 26, 2008 - 18 comments

Everybody Dance Now
posted by Xurando on Jun 13, 2008 - 62 comments

God Save The Thief (automatic download) is a mashup of The Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen" and Wolfmother's "Joker and The Thief" mixed by The Illuminoids.
posted by jason's_planet on Jun 4, 2008 - 23 comments

Looking for a song online? Use Muxfind to search Muxtape (previously) for tracks.
posted by Korou on May 27, 2008 - 30 comments

Pitching Ziggy the Movie "Maybe the complaints department is part of the conspiracy to keep Ziggy down..."
posted by Del Far on Apr 23, 2008 - 31 comments

Once a week high quality digital recordings of cassette tapes purchased at the Dalston Oxfam Shop in East London.
posted by klangklangston on Apr 14, 2008 - 14 comments

Music is good. Free is good. So free music must be double good. With over 1000 albums listed from netlabels and other sources, Free Albums Galore (mentioned a while ago) is a well-curated collection of links to some of the best free full-length releases on the 'net. Of course, there are a lot more netlabel resources out there. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd on Apr 8, 2008 - 9 comments

Idle nostalgia led me to check on the mp3 page for Bulb Records (early home of Quintron and Andrew WK).

That all reminded me of space/noise rockers Gravitar, whose drummer Ben Cook has put up a fair amount their music (and other music he's made) for free. Oh, and he has a (rarely updated) music blog, which mentioned the Weird Sound Generator and Noizehole. [more inside]
posted by klangklangston on Mar 25, 2008 - 10 comments

GeeksOn "A show created by Geeks for Geeks, covering topics that Geeks like to talk about." This is one of my favorite podcasts out there, most topics they cover are talked about in a very smart manner with lots of philosophy and moral quandaries thrown in, and they have gone on to get some great interviews with various people in Geek culture including Christina Hendricks, who plays Saffron from Firefly, and its Producer, Lisa Lassek(Christina is the sister of one of the geeks), Orson Scott Card, George R.R. Martin, Forrest J Ackerman, Garrett Wang, and the man himself Joss Whedon! [more inside]
posted by Del Far on Mar 25, 2008 - 17 comments

Shareminer is a clownsuit engine that searches for files upped to Rapidshare, Megaupload, SendSpace, ZShare, and other similar one click hosts. A great tool for locating full, rare, and out of print albums. [more inside]
posted by Item on Mar 21, 2008 - 47 comments

Like a dog fucking a blender. Six-Word Reviews of each of the 763 SXSW Mp3s. [Previously] [Via]
posted by churl on Mar 13, 2008 - 68 comments

w00t is a 50-minute collage piece by Bob Ostertag, using sounds and music from 18 different videogames. It's a lot of fun to listen to, and it's freely available and downloadable, as are a bunch of other albums of his.
posted by sleevener on Mar 10, 2008 - 8 comments

Geek Pop '08. Online science music festival at the Null Hypothesis science blog, with mp3 downloads. Featuring the immense Dark Matter by Johnny Berliner. [more inside]
posted by algreer on Mar 7, 2008 - 3 comments

Surf your music. Audio surfer is a new game that uses .mp3 files to create racetracks of musical goodness. If guitar hero and F-Zero had a love child, this would be it.
posted by JimmyJames on Feb 29, 2008 - 48 comments

Go way back into time with a deliciously analog collection of mastermixes from 1980s-era soul radio from London. [more inside]
posted by dhammond on Feb 29, 2008 - 3 comments

Barefiles: the premiere source for dubstep mixes [more inside]
posted by prostyle on Feb 28, 2008 - 30 comments

Anglo-Finnish artist Sanna Annukka's vibrant, flat design work (especially her Icons series) got me curious about her, well, iconography.

She mentioned The Kalevala previously, the Finnish national epic poem (in Finnish here), a tale of creation and heroism that arguably spurred the Finns to independence from the Russians.

Like so much else epic and awesome, it spawned a '70s prog band, with three albums.
posted by klangklangston on Feb 25, 2008 - 23 comments

Little Hat Jones - Bye Bye Baby Blues
Bye Bye Baby Blues Tab
Dennis (Little Hat) Jones, a Texas bluesman considered a notable of Naples, Texas. He record ten sides of his own and made nine more accompanying the very idiosyncratic and hard to follow Texas Alexander. Bye Bye Baby Blues is a very sweet song that also appears on the Ghost World soundtrack.
See also Texas Blues Guitar (1929-1935) .
posted by y2karl on Feb 16, 2008 - 7 comments

His Career Is In Your Hands. Musician / Producer Butch Walker (formerly of Marvelous 3) had a rough autumn in 2007. He was renting a home from a Chili Pepper, a home into which he had moved all of his personal and professional belongings. Unfortunately, Flea's Malibu rental property was directly in the path of California's November batch of wildfires. Tough break indeed. So how does an artist recover from such a devastating loss? He gives away his newest live double-album for free. Or $5.99. The choice is yours. Why? The domain name says it all.
posted by grabbingsand on Feb 15, 2008 - 18 comments

Here are 52 cover songs that Of Montreal have done over the years. via
posted by carsonb on Feb 1, 2008 - 37 comments

What do you call capturing sound the way the human head hears it, that is, three-dimensionally? Nope, not stereo. Binaural recording. Holophonics. Dummy head (no, not you) recording. [more inside]
posted by artifarce on Jan 29, 2008 - 14 comments

The Overdub Tampering Comittee Manifesto. What if there was a network of musicians who got a hold of albums right as they leaked, added subtle yet very much additional overdubs all over the album, and then re-leaked it to the internet? ... We set out to make that specific bewildering, annoyance a possibility. [more inside]
posted by whir on Jan 12, 2008 - 42 comments

You desire to listen to "The Shadow Out of Time". You may also desire to listen to adaptations of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour Out of Space. Possibly you desire to listen to Neil Gaiman's Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes pastiche A Study in Emerald, the text of which is available in a fetchingly formatted PDF. Or maybe it's all academic, and you'd rather just listen to some lectures about Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
posted by Pope Guilty on Jan 11, 2008 - 19 comments

The Recording Industry Association of America are seeking damages in a federal case against Jeffrey Howell, who kept a collection of about 2,000 recordings on his PC. The RIAA's lawyer states that the files Howell made on his computer from legally purchased CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.
posted by porn in the woods on Dec 30, 2007 - 75 comments

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you can get what you need. [more inside]
posted by punkfloyd on Dec 23, 2007 - 23 comments

The best music of 2007 according to Stereogum, Pitchfork, All Music, NME, PopMatters, The A.V. Club, Rolling Stone, TIME, MTV, the Guardian, eMusic, Amazon, Spin Magazine, Q, Largehearted Boy, and more. Among the most frequently listed are Radiohead, Spoon, Arcade Fire, Of Montreal, Feist, and The National.
posted by Soup on Dec 18, 2007 - 68 comments

An FPP for your holiday listening pleasure. Ha ha ha. [more inside]
posted by miss lynnster on Dec 18, 2007 - 15 comments

Vintage Christmas Wax The Edison Concert band never sounded so good.
posted by Stynxno on Dec 13, 2007 - 6 comments