oh, mp3 blogs, how I love to feel your freebie goodness...

Music piracy is becoming an out-dated term. As formats gradually make the transition to digital exchange, we can no longer be expected not to take that itty bitty digital information and share it with those around us. Before, we burned the same amount of data on endless CDs, before that, cassette tapes. In the early eighties, the music industry were convinced home-taping would ruin the business. They were wrong. They had the same fears about CDR, but that didn't ruin the industry either. No, what is hurting the industry, and what is slowly being corrected, is the fact that the average music listener (say, someone who wants the top-forty singles that he or she hears every day on the radio) does not want to pay close to twenty bucks for a CD that contains on two or three songs that he or she will listen to. Because the average music consumer does not actually consume albums, but rather tracks, hits, singles, those really aren't worth the twenty bucks for the CD.

So, paying per song has been the thing for a few years now. ITunes, that megahouse of hits and non-hits, offers all of its media up for sale, and it's really not a terrible deal, for the most part. But the media is largely protected from being shared beyond its initial purchase. In some cases, such as the Zune mp3 player, you are restricted to how many times you can play something that has been shared with you.

But that is all legal music downloading. What about piracy? Well, piracy, these days, is about as legit and illegit as you can get, but the crackdowns are inevitable. Oink, one of the more respected of torrent sites, was shut down last fall, and music devotees are still scrambling to find the next in big music-sharing torrent sites. As far as illegal downloading of movies, Stage 6 is gone, making DVD quality-rips of movies and television shows difficult to locate. For the quality-obsessed music lover, the options for illegal downloading are limited. Torrent sites assure some level of quality. Open-use downloading services, like Soulseek, are free to use, and unlike most torrent sites, don't require an invite to join, but the quality of the files on these sites are questionable, variable, and you start to feel like a download savage.

Having a Mac, none of these options are really that attractive to me. I can't pay for all the music I want. I can't download everything off of my Mac soulseek, because it is slow, limited, and unreliable. I can't use most torrent sites because a)OSX and b)I don't have the patience to establish a cred simply so I can get the occasional album before its proper release. I don't really care about getting something pre-release. What I want is reliable, steady-rate downloads, for free, from people who know what they're posting.

I use mp3 blogs. The set up is absurdly simple. These blogs connect to third-party storage sites where they have uploaded .zip or .rar files. They make a post, connect to where the album is downloadable, and bam, in a few minutes, you have what you've been promised. I dig raiding mp3 blogs for much the same reason I dig going to a place like Jerry's. It's like crate digging, only I don't leave the confines of my workplace or the comfort of my home. I have little to no say about what I can find, it's all the luck of the draw, but the results can be surprising, enlightening, and if an album turns out to be terrible, I toss it away.

Illegal? Yes. But many, many of these sites specialize in specific, hard-to-find items, some only ever released on a limited run of vinyl, some only offered on tiny international labels, some only ever dubbed onto cassettes. That's not to say I only visit those sites. No, I will be honest, I download a ton off of mp3 blogs, and a good 50% of it is stuff that I would purchase, were I someone who could afford purchasing music.

I don't feel like a pirate about it, however. I don't feel righteous in the theft, or wrong, but I do know that my support of a band goes farther than the few bucks I would shell out for their music. Going to see live bands, the story is entirely different. Buying albums from bands directly on tour (well, you know, the kind of bands that travel by van and not by plane...) is one of the best things you can do for a band, and a nice compliment that benefits them and you at the same time. Bands and artists want nothing more than attentive, album-buying audience members, and it's not just because they want your money. They want your appreciation, they want the knowledge that you will go home with their CD, possibly put it on, possibly put it on for other people, and that CD will be a part of your life, and remain in your life for as long as you allow it to exist there. There's something so very honest and tangible about selling your music to someone. If able, I always try to buy music at the shows I go to. I save up for months in advance of my annual trip to the Athens Popfest, so that I am able to support the bands that I like in the best possible fashion.

Oh, but I'm off-course. MP3 blogs are ideal for the scrounging and searching music lover, the kind of listener who has never quite settled on what he or she wants to hear on any given day. I start with going to Totally Fuzzy, which constantly updates its MP3 blog feeds. I try to only do this twice a week, at most, because there can be a lot of repetition in the blogosphere, and with so much to go through, I try to limit how much reheated stuff I have to go through. Many times, the MP3 blogs work in a kind of hierarchy, with the best blogs posting daily new stuff, and the mediocre blogs reposting the same files on their blogs later in the week. This secondary-posting is really evident on the TF index, because you'll see the same names over and over again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can so blatantly promote music piracy. I know I can't encourage it at all on the radio, and I know there are fundamentals of the practice that are wrong, wrong, wrong for bands and artists. Tiny underground labels are hurt the worst by piracy, as their budgets are not bloated, and of course, it's less fun to take from the little guy. I try to avoid downloading albums from labels and bands and artists that I absolutely know I will be speaking to again. I try to only download from reputable, higher-tier blogs, and I try to support bands and artists in other ways, which is a common fallback defense, but there is more to being a music listener than simply having the music in your possession. There is a life to live with music, and it doesn't just start with each beginning track on an album or the first note to a song. It doesn't end when the music is turned off. Part of my daily life is the locating, listening, absorbing, and understanding of music. That is why I have a radio show, that is why I blog about the radio show, that is why I obsessively scan the blogs, hoping to find that gem I've never heard of, which I often do, and then I get to experience a new romance.

So, okay, point of the post - MP3 blogs are not for everyone. It can be tedious to weed through poorly-organized blogs, and sometimes the files are of poor quality and are poorly organized. But if you can find three or four blogs that consistently pay off, then you've made a great start.


Okay, that got a little babbling and involved. Here's a palate cleanser:

woo! i love the little touch of having annabelle wear a pirate hat. and the weird thrusty dance the group does, as if the choreography was done exclusively by a weird hybrid troupe of strippers and break dancers.

new show, new blog, and a new reason to get up early...

I started with "Afternoon Tea," but it's always been a problem accomodating that Monday time slot. For some reason, it's a real trouble spot on the employee schedule at my workplace. So, I'm going to let Ashira do her thing solo-style, and take on a brand new entity, hereby known as "The City in the Morning."

The name is simple enough to explain. If you're like me, meaning that you're a Magnetic Fields fan, you might think it's a play on "The Village in the Morning." Which it is. Really, that's it.

I'm not terribly good at the whole rising-and-shining thing, especially when five out seven days, I'm probably due at work by 8 am. But if I can get to the station and start the new show at 9 am, then I think you can reach out your arm, turn on the clock radio, and tune in. If you tune in via computer, this might be a more challenging matter.

I will be playing much of the same stuff I played on "Afternoon Tea," while shying away from strictly pop stuff. It's a grab-bag type deal, complete with 45s and LPs, and giveaways (mostly mixes from my personal library of music), but also possibly in-studio guests.

I am on the air as of this Thursday (April 3) morning. So tune in!