Free Music Isn’t All Bad
February 29, 2008
Well RIAA doesn’t agree with that statement, but music that is freely available for download does create some perks for music artists. Take what South by Southwest (SXSW) has done. SXSW is a music and film festival in Texas which started out as a battle of the bands and eventually grew into one of the largest music festival events in the US. After the festival is over, SXSW offers a large MP3 file over Bittorrent for free of most of the artists which participated in the events. More than 1,400 this year. This is especially convenient for those of us who can’t make it down to Texas for the week.
Scobleizer brought the availability of the torrent file to my attention from one of his posts. I knew about SXSW going on this month, but I didn’t know that there was a file for download. I definitely agree with Scoble saying this isn’t “stolen” music, but a gift from the artists. Freely available music is great for start-up indie bands, to become better known; look at Feist, for example. Bittorrent is a great way to distribute large files (even full seasons of television shows) across the internet. Although it is always associated with controversial downloading issues and recent malware issues.
SXSW is just trying to help out startup bands. Almost reminds me of Robin Williams helping out the boys at the TED conference yesterday with some comic relief.
I hope that new music breakthroughs keep happening on the web, like Hypemachine now being able to upload tracks from Lastfm.com accounts. Sweet!
Tasia
Filed in student posts, Tasia Bulger
Tags: Bittorrent, Music, RIAA, SXSW, tasia bulger
UPEI - BUS442.0 
March 3, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Have you tried downloading the file Tasia?
Another great SXSW tool to check out is here: http://www.last.fm/group/SXSW+Music/ It looks at your last.fm profile and then tells you when bands that you like are playing at SXSW, and it recommends other bands you’d probably like and when they’re playing.
And to clarify, the way the Hype Machine/last.fm link works is that when you play a tune on Hype Machine it now “scrobbles” to last.fm. Scrobbling is the term they use to describe capturing the act of you playing a song and adding that to your last.fm profile. They’ve done this for a long time with iPods and iTunes.
March 3, 2008 at 2:45 pm
I think this post really relates to one of the posts I made last night about giving stuff away increases your sales. Like Tasia said you are getting your name out there. No one is going to buy your stuff unless they know who you are, so why not give them a taste and see what happens. If you are any good at all they will most likely come back to you. The same goes for the book in my post or to the music in Tasia’s post.
-TAG
March 3, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Dave: I did start downloading the file in class, and the first thing I did was check out what song files were listed under the detailed info tab. There are 764 songs. There is some of my favs listed on there, like Oh No, Oh My’s classic “Walk in the Park”, and some stuff by Kate Tucker and the Sons of Sweden and Spiral Beach. Of course a file listing wouldn’t be complete without Jen Lekman’s “Opposite of Hallelujah”, everyone went crazy over that song.
I think I’m going to get back into my last.fm account, it was pretty useful to use when I wanted to find more bands like the ones I already listen to, but I’ve been pretty busy lately.