I Crave free music

When Salon.com dropped its daily download feature last year, I was really bummed out by it. It was an incredibly good source of new music and from it I learned about such acts like New Pornographers, Arcade Fire, Bloc Party and so on. The tracks they offered were not throwaways either but solid pieces that were featured as Single cuts later on by the acts.

Indeed, it was the loss of this feature that decided for me to drop my annual subscription to the site. I rarely visit the site as it was for its articles and political commentary as I moved onto other sites which offered the same for free.

Still I missed that source. I still get free music from my monthly subscription from Paste magazine. iTunes was also pretty decent but they had only 2-3 songs a week with one of them always a Latino act of some sort. But it is not enough for me to satisfy my desire for new and exciting acts from any genre.

So it was gratifying when I came across the free MP3 feature from Crave through MP3.com. Apparently, this was a new feature that was added a few months ago but one I never noticed in my infrequent visits to the site. It was like being the proverbial kid in the candy store when I saw all of these songs. It took me about two days to download them all, about 90 so far. it did not matter who they were or what genre they were classified, any free music was worth listening to at least once.

After going through the list once, the quality was consistent with what I have experienced before with Paste magazine CD’s: two or three top cuts interspersed with a dozen mediocre or uninteresting songs. I figure that our of the 90 songs, there are a dozen I really like and would listen to again and again. M83’s We Own the Sky is a killer track for me with its synth beats and ethereal vocals. Jenny Lewis’s country rock tracks were uniformly good all around especially Charging Sky. While I am not a fan of hard rock, the many free tracks of MudHoney were appreciated. I like the hard driving chords of the Straight Life.

On the downside, after listening to the Flight of the ConChords, I do not know why they are such a hit among critics; Jimmie Reign’s R&B tracks just were not my thing along with Ghislain Porter electronica version of hip-hop.

All in all, a decent mix of indie rock and electronica have found a home on my playlists and for that I am appreciative of Crave and MP3.com