"Ramen Music hand-picks the best new tracks from independent & underground artists, simmers on low, and delivers beautiful online issues every 2 months." Issue #1 is free, available as a sample.
posted by Memo
on Feb 10, 2011 -
13 comments
Midwest label
Suburban Sprawl puts out a CD of X-Mas music every winter. They've collected the last eight years of them
here. Highlights include The High Strung, The Hard Lessons, and the common lament, "Santa Just Crashed Into My House and He's Drunk as Fuck."
posted by klangklangston
on Dec 1, 2010 -
16 comments
Serein v4. Online UK label Serein's
last redesign saw a number of ambient and experimental albums released for free. They've redesigned again with a slightly more realistic business model, and in addition to the
two releases out so far, they've put out three free "
forecasts" so far, mixtapes of a sort, arranged by the artists.
Three is the latest, and by halfway through I knew it would likely be appreciated here.
posted by BlackLeotardFront
on May 18, 2010 -
4 comments
Summer Mix Series is the soundtrack to your summer. Created by
yewknee.com, this collection of user submitted mix CDs encourages submissions to have unique, specific themes, giving many of these mixes a more cohesive edge than "Bill's Favorite Tunes June 2009". Listen to summer, 48 CDs and counting!
[more inside]
posted by CharlesV42
on Jul 24, 2009 -
17 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
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
“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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
