Broadly, what I’m trying to do here:
I spend a lot of time trawling the newly added albums on Amie Street. You know, the free ones. Some days its good, some days its not so good. Some days its sublime. Something truely great goes up, something you probably wouldn’t have ever listened to if it wasn’t free, but that you find you like enough to go and buy the back catalogue.
Amie street is a bit chaotic, and that’s the wonderful thing about it. I do recs from my main account, the one I purchase from, but that has a limited use and only a limited number of people see it. You only get recs by spending money, and if you spend a lot of time trawling the pool of new uploads you don’t need to spend that much money. So recs get rare. There’s some other reasons too. Recs are quite limited. Sometimes you find something good that you don’t personally like, but you want to tell people about. Recs also have a built-in time pressure, the need to get your rec in before another person hits buy and the price goes up, pathetic as that is.
So the idea here is to talk a bit more, suggest a bit more widely, and hopefully some people out there will get some good music that they wouldn’t have otherwise, and maybe get it cheap or free.
I’ll plug people unashamedly. Some because I like them, some because they deserve to be liked. It’ll be arbitary and a bit random – I usually concentrate on the music that’s still free when I log in, and what’s free depends on time zones and who uploads when, that kind of thing. I’m not an musician, and I’m not promoting anyone who’s a friend – although I’ll probably plug people I meet through the blog, or Amie St, or wherever. I’ve done this with recs before, and probably will again.
I won’t just be writing about Amie Street. I’m a user of emusic, cdbaby, and various of the smaller indie-based sites. Some of the free ones. Sometimes I buy music directly from the labels sites. Sometimes I’m even a user of itunes. Occasionally I even use Amazon to find CDs – but not often. I’m not in the US, so postage starts to bite on even a second-hand one-dollar CD.
Basically this blog is about finding some good music.
Genres? What I look for first is usually indie rock and folk. Alternative, too, but that’s so broad a label now it doesn’t seem to mean much – kind of like rock. Also classical, pop, acoustic, americana, trance, house… most things. I love gritty heartbreaking folk rock. I love big trance anthems. I love the anger in the sixties rock, the whimsy in indie pop. Just lately I’ve been having a bit of synthpop thing. I listen to some Jazz, but I don’t know nearly enough about it that I’m going to start expressing opinions on the interweb. Same goes for blues. I haven’t spent enough time learning what I need to learn to appreciate hip hop, so this blog’s unlikely to help if that’s what you’re after, but if you know of a link to a good intro guide, it’d be great thing to do to drop me a line and let me know about it.
The name? That’s because down where I am a local record store used to have a dollar sale table. They’d buy up old jukebox CDs and dump whole boxes on this table. Lots of it wasn’t of much interest, but occasionally there was some brilliant stuff, if you hunted. A jukebox’s cast-offs, so it was music people in pubs would pay to listen to. Great for backfilling your collection with stuff you remember from back in the day. Downside was, of course, lots of other people knew about it to, so there was a bit of a race on, even while you were standing at the table. People blocked each other with elbows, people started looking in the back box so they could lean over the front one and cover it with their bodies. All very intense. Lucky Amie Street isn’t quite to zero-sum. You can get a free track and a dozen other people can too.
