I am a dedicated music listener and if there is anything I crave more is being able to listen to as many varied artists as possible. Blues, Jazz, rock, classical, electronic, oldies, new artists, I will listen to them all. Yet, I have not been much for commercial radio these days. Most local stations tend to be niche sort of stations focusing on one genre or even narrowly within a sub-genre. I am more eclectic than that but I do not want to keep changing the station every hour. Nor do I like my enjoyment be interrupted with mindless patter and local radio commercials.
So my preference is just download music from CDs like my own CD collection or the free CD that comes with the Paste magazine collection. At one time, I used to buy a few CDs every month but that is an expense I can not afford anymore. When I do purchase music now, its from iTunes on an occasional basis. Most of the music I have acquired in the past year tend to come from free downloads like iTunes weekly trio of free downloads and until recently the free downloads from cNet’s music download site.
The cNet download site had proven over the two years I been using it, an endless font of good music across many genres. Many of the artists tend to be upcoming ones or obscure even in their own genre but that does not matter too much to me. If the music is good and interesting, I will download it, play it a few times and if I like it, it becomes part of my permanent collection. An artist like Tilly and the Wall would remain unknown to me if it was not for the cNet site.
So imagine my consternation when CBS, owner of cNet decided to shut down the site and redirect visitors to another music site they bought, Last.fm. The reason why the cNet site was shut down is simply that CBS paid millions for the Last.fm site but was not getting much return on it. So they decide to consolidate all of their music properties under one banner and website which includes the cNet site.
As a standalone website, Last.fm is quite attractive. It is a site where you can browse for music acts, popular and unknown, look st their bios and release dates, view their videos, listen via streaming to tracks from their album either as 30 seconds like iTunes or as the full song. Based on your song selections, you might get a series of suggested tracks much like the Pandora website which matches songs based on a certain sound or style unlike iTunes Genius feature which is based on what people are buying along with the track you are all sharing.
There is also a community aspect to the site where people can add bands as part of their favorites library and through a ShoutBox, able to talk about their favorite bands. You can buy music through the site as it can link up with your iTunes or Amazon accounts. You learn, hear, view, talk all about the music.
So it was fairly easy to search on some band names, pull up an extensive section on them and add them to my library. Right now as of early April 2009, I have 10 acts in my library but I can see where the list can grown quite extensively very rapidly.
There is another aspect to the site that I really like is that like many other popular Web 3.0 sites like Facdbook and Flickr, the website owners have opened up the website through APIs to allow people to create their own mini apps for the desktop or for websites especially sites build upon blogging software like Wordpress. By allowing these bursts of creativity, people become more invested with last.fm and that can only help its popularity.
Finally, there is the downloads. last.fm does offer them though it took me awhile to figure out where they were located. For some reason, free downloads is something that needs to be made obscure as possible. The main caveat of their download section is that it is a pale shadow of what cNet had within their website. cNet actually built the music download website from what once was MP3.com which was another popular site for me way back around 2000 or so where I managed to get some really dance/techno and Celtic music tracks. Last.fm seems to have maybe 250 tracks available for download. No doubt a good portion of those are from decent artists with decent songs but I do miss the vast library that the cNet site had with plenty of hidden treasures among the chaff if you are willing to seek them out.
So that’s the kicker for me. While catching with some of the old bands of my youth (for some reason I am on a Spoons kick right now) is kind of nice and I have marked some bands and tunes as personal favorites, it is sort of like the Facebook site for music for me. Nice to visit from time to time but not an essential part of my on-line life ( that would be Flickr for those in the know).
Still something is better than nothing and any source of downloadable music for me is a godsend. For several years, Salon was an excellent source for me as that site had a song discovery of the day. I found about Arcade Fire, Stars and New Pornographers from that site but they removed that feature some time ago. iTunes free weekly downloads are important as too the monthly CD from Paste. It is not enough though so now I am faced with the prospect of actually listening to radio now to discover new music. I cringe at the thought of that but music is part of my life as it is for many of my generation. If I have to buy it, so be it. But I am not looking forward to that prospect.
Ugh!