blocSonic and the netBloc series

It cannot be stressed enough that the future of music is as uncertain right now as it has ever been. Giant corporations are competing with dozens of different sorts of indie music outlets. Some are focusing on older technologies, some on newer. Of the newer tech, the dominant phenomenon is the netlabel: publishers who primarily use the World Wide Web to publicize and promote their artists albums which they distribute electronically. Of the netlabels that I've interacted with, blocSonic is by far the most innovative and prolific.

Android and free music

Free music reviews are a fine thing, but knowing that there's free music out there and being able to conveniently listen to it on whatever devices you have handy are not the same thing at all. I thought I'd spend some time on how I do that and what tools exist to make your life easier if you have an Android phone or tablet like me.

Welcome to new readers

Dangerously Free Sounds would like to welcome our new readers. I've just started to put some advertising out for the blog, so expect to see more posts here, soon (I have one coming for one of my favorite ambient bands, Celestial Aeon Project). Meanwhile, feel free to browse by labels. Some of the most populated tags on the site are electronic and rock. To those who came here thinking that, perhaps, this was going to be your ticket to free copies of Lady Gaga's latest album, let me clarify the history a bit:

As I mentioned in my first posting on this blog, DFS is about exploring the music that artists give to the public for free download. Sometimes they release or perform one or a few songs as a promotion for the rest of their work, such as you'll find on Free Music Archive's WFMU. Sometimes artists want to get their music out there first to build a brand, as you'll find on Jamendo.com. No matter how or why music is released to the public, though, I want to find it and review it so that others can enjoy it too.

That's the mission of DFS: bring free music to an audience that will enjoy it. So... enjoy!

Why free music?

I've had friends ask why I would bother wading through the mountains of truly awful music that's offered for free, just to find the few gems. After all, isn't it easier to pay someone else to do that work for me? Well, here's the thing: if I do that work and then review the good songs, albums and artists on my blog, then lots of other people get the benefit. Sure, I spend my time wading through the noise, but I get to see thousands of others reap the benefits.

On the other hand, I get to discover bands like Diablo Swing Orchestra (who restored the joy that heavy metal brought to me when I was a teen), Atomic Cat (who demonstrated that the terms "dance" and "quality music" were not mutually exclusive) and so many more. It's a real pleasure to listen to this music, whether it's free or not.

So enjoy the blog, download the music and have a great time! If you feel like giving back, post a comment to this thread, and tell me what you've discovered!

Val Davis raising funds for a new Album

Cover of Val Davis's first album

Val Davis, whose first album is a rock/country/folk hybrid called Immortal, is raising money for a second album. His first work was characterized by an acoustic sense of open spaces, wonder and humor, best summed up by the dreamy Texas Sky and the tongue-in-cheek Court of Greedy Kings. I suggest giving the album a try (the Jamendo download has some really annoying song naming problems with underscores all over the place (intentional?) but you can find it on Amazon's MP3 download service for just $9 if you want to save the time in correcting song names.

Anyway, if you like it, consider contributing to his next album. I'd love to see more patronized free music production, and to that end, I've already thrown a few dollars his way.

CBC Radio 3

CBC Radio 3 is an excellent Canadian radio station that's broadcast over the Internet and via Sirius Satellite Radio. They're also a curator on Free Music Archive where you can get access to reviews, concert recordings, and free music uploads from many artists featured on their station.

The service was originally modeled on BBC Radio One and similar efforts, and has been successful in reaching a wide audience and bringing attention to a number of performers. Pop and experimental pop hybrids are their primary focus, with more of the experimental work showing up on Free Music Archive and more of the mainstream on the Internet stream. The Web site is also a blog with its own reviews, artist interviews and promotional tracks.

I recommend that everyone explore the service, and thank my good neighbors, the Canadians, for supporting this sort of station!

Magnifier: Google Music's free stuff!

Google Music has just launched their free service, which will allow you to upload 20,000 of your own music files, and then provide additional room for purchased and free music from the service which can then be streamed over the Web or to your Android device (and presumably other platforms in the future). In conjunction with the service, they have a Web site called Magnifier, which they use to advertise free music. Right now there are some examples up from David Bowie and The Rolling Stones, but that's part of the promotion for the launch. Typically, during the beta period, they've had up-and-coming bands that are publishing free tracks as a way of advertising.

I've discovered a few gems through Magnifier including:

• Empros by Russian Circles, an instrumental hard rock piece that reminds me of some of the earlier pieces from one of Jamendo's most popular commons artists, PeerGynt Lobogris
• Baby by Alice Smith & Aloe Blacc, an American cover of a 1969 Brazilian pop tune
• Marathon by Tennis, a wonderfully upbeat and strange ballad about a sailing trip

I recommend throwing Magnifier into your RSS feed reader (e.g. Google Reader) of choice; I know I have!

I'm also keeping an eye on other services, and intend to do a post about the free stuff available elsewhere sometime this week.

Blog Review: Free Albums Galore

As I mentioned in my first post, Free Albums Galore is no longer being updated, but the blog still exists and it's a great resource for free music of the past six and a half years. You can browse their posts by using the "Archives by Month" or "Search" widgets on the right hand side of the page.

Free Albums Galore was an eclectic resource for finding the latest in everything from Psychedelia to World music to Electronica to Prog Rock. I tried to listen to as many of these as I was able, but in the end, I only had so many hours in the day.

Some of the sources that Free Albums Galore introduced me to will become common items, here on Dangerously. Those include Jamendo (a sort of social network for music makers and downloaders alike); the Internet Audio Archive (a branch of the Internet Archive, home of the infamous Wayback Machine); and the Free Music Archive (sort of the Rolling Stone of free music archival on the Web). Along with those, Free Albums Galore introduced me to the myriad of Netlabels out there that had free and for-pay music, and I'll have to spend quite a bit of time on those at some point in the near future as well, especially the awesome and ongoing netBlocs from blocSonic!

Welcome to Dangerously Free Sounds!

A long time ago, I got hooked on freely downloadable music, thanks to an excellent music review blog, Free Albums Galore, and ever since, I've filled my hard drives with amazing music, created by some of the most creative people I've ever heard. I learned quite a lot from Free Albums. I learned that free music has a cost, and that cost is time (for-pay music has millions of people acting as my filter, sifting out the few songs that are worth listening to). I also learned that there are permutations of musical genres that I thought I knew, which have the capacity to change the way I see the culture of music production. I've bought CDs based on free albums I've downloaded. I've written my own reviews on my existing blog, and generally, I've become as involved in free music as I had time for.

Today, I notice that Free Albums has closed down, and so it seems like a good time to start my own free music review blog. Thinking about why I like free music so much, one of the words that keeps coming to mind is: dangerous. It's dangerous for the studio business model for people to enjoy a free product. It's dangerous for your understanding of the quality and nature of music to listen to a wide range of sources of new tunes.

So, danger is in the title of this blog. Free sounds is also in the title, so over the next few posts, I'm going to introduce everyone to all of the general sources of free music that I'm aware of. After that, this blog will mostly settle down into being a general music review blog dedicated to freely downloadable music.

One note about free vs. pirated music: My definition of freely downloadable music includes any music that's distributed by its creators with the intent that others download it without paying to do so. It doesn't mean that the music is free to then share, though I'll try to point out when that's not allowed.

Pirating music via BitTorrent or other P2P networks is another thing entirely. It's not that BitTorrent itself is a bad thing. I use BitTorrent to download operating systems and updates for software along with some free content that's distributed that way. I love the protocol and the tools, but I'm not encouraging people to pirate music in this blog. I think the RIAA is shooting itself in the foot, and I think that the truly free music out there is a reaction to how they treat their customers, but this blog is about downloading music from authorized sources only!

OK, the disclaimers are out of the way and I'm ready to start reviewing. Let's get to it!