The purpose of the blog? A way of pointing folks to repositories of free music. The background for me is that early last year, I decided to “go legit”. With hundreds of CDs in my collection and inexpensive a la carte options like iTunes and eMusic at hand, there simply wasn’t an excuse for not buying or ripping the vast majority of my music collection. The result? More than 95% of the tracks on my computer are now either ripped, purchased on-line, or are free tracks.
Free tracks have been an important way of getting exposed to new artists – and I’ll spotlight new goldmines going forward in an effort to make things easier for everyone to hear new stuff while helping artists to get people in the habit of paying something for their media consumption habits! (Yes, I did pay $25 a long time ago to buy Howard Jones’ CD Dream Into Action).
So, I’ll highlight 3 sources a week for the next while and post comments if you have suggestions of your own!
#1) Urban Outfitters: – A surprisingly good choice of tracks, plus they are on volume 7 right now. There’s a free code for iTunes here that’s good until the end of January, 2010, and for volumes 6 and before, you can access the mp3s directly by appending /mp3 to the end of the URL (e.g. http://lstn.urbanoutfitters.com/6/mp3/).
#2) Daytrotter: The best location for in-studio performances? It has to be Daytrotter, which has featured lots of indie bands such as Death Cab for Cutie, Blitzen Trapper, and the National. Upcoming bands that are playing live in Toronto in a few weeks that have tracks on Daytrotter include Mew and A.A. Bondy!
#3) Largehearted Boy: My favourite MP3 blog has to be Largehearted Boy. It not only features free MP3s of the day, but new releases, news tidbits, and even book reviews. No blog I know of keeps on top of the latest news as well as this.
–Rich
