September roundup

The main post this month is something I thought should be written as an article in its own right, so here's just a quick roundup of the other things going on.

I mentioned last month that I'd received the mp3s for Francis Rodino's new EP. Well the CD itself has now arrived as well, meaning the Pledge music process has been somewhat faster than the Sellaband one, both in terms of the time for fundraising and the time between completion of fundraising and release. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting on a number of artists from Sellaband for their CDs, including several who completed funding back in 2008.

And this increasing wait for Sellaband artists is just one of many things completely putting people off the site. In the first week of September, the friend from my university days has finally had enough and updated his Sellaband status to read "Goodbye Sellaband. It was nice while it lasted, but it's time to move on". Looking at the list of 25 artists he had bought parts in, it looks like he is still waiting for 3 or 4 CDs as well, but otherwise has decided he won't be buying any more.

AmieStreet closes down and redirects to Amazon. I managed to get nearly all the remaining money I had there into tracks and downloaded, but their servers were obviously overloaded with people in the same kind of rush, as the process took me several attempts over a number of days to complete. This is yet another case that highlights the fact of why I'd much rather have an album than download mp3s. Every time a site like this closes down or moves on you're in danger of losing the music you paid for. At least with a CD, the chances are you can still rip it again quite happily. And at your own leisure rather than being forced into a deadline too - essentially your music backup is already created! The $5 Amazon voucher was no compensation for non-US buyers though, as even if you redeem the voucher it can't actually be spent if you live outside the USA.

I am enjoying the site that the amiestreet people have moved onto though. Whilst Songza is aimed as being for a group of people to collaborate on playlists, I'm actually finding it the best site I visited since Yahoo terminated their Launchcast service. No prizes for guessing it's the music site I'm spending most time on at present. Essentially it allows you to set up a streaming station which only plays what you choose. The main downside compared to Launchcast is that it doesn't suggest artists for you to listen to based on what the station already plays, so essentially you have to go find and add songs yourself. I do have a few gripes with it, such as the fact you can't remove a track you may have added by mistake, nor can you remove a station once you've created it. (My initial experimentation meant I landed up creating 2 stations of the same name). Also the fact you can't listen to a preview of the track to check it's a) the right one and b) it's OK can be a bit of a problem. For example I went and added Lordi's "The Arockralypse" album and it's obvious the encoding is screwed up. This means every track on the entire album is playing in mega-slo-mo satanic, which is somewhat ironic when you consider the band's actual image.

For those of you interested in Indie artists, it's quite interesting what I've dug up on there (and indeed what I haven't). For instance there's no sign of Nemesea, yet all you Lily and Cubworld fans can go listen to their Sellaband albums (amongst those of many other 50K artists). And it doesn't stop there. Radius have their single "Prisoner of your love" on there, even though their album isn't yet released. And there's even music from artists on Sellaband who haven't reached a target such as some Wetwerks tracks. Matthew Ebel's back catalogue appears to have been sneezed on, meaning there's a howling gap after his album "Beer and Coffee" with the next album being "Songs from the vault vol 2.", meaning SFTV vol 1 and a couple of others from the intervening era are missing. There's also quite a few artists I recognise from either Stereofame or Thesixtyone that i've been able to dig up as well. In short it's well worth having a look to see who you can search up, as the site contains a broad selection of well known and indie artists, and also covers music released from at least the 1950s to (almost) current based on who I listen to that I've found. I'm still working on my own (call it personal) radio station, but if you've got anyone you think I ought to listen to, then here's the station you can add to A username I recognise from Sellaband has already come in and started adding some stuff to this one as well. Basically go ahead and knock yourselves out and join them.

Using Songza is currently completely free. More importantly there's absolutely nothing to download - it streams the music without bothering you to install any player, library management software or other junk that sites seem so keen to throw at you these days. There are some adverts on the site, but you can quite happily swap out to another tab or minimise your browser and it will keep playing so you don't have to be disturbed by them at all. But I find myself wondering how long the service will a) remain free and b) whether it will eventually go the same way as the likes of Pandora and lock non-US users out of the system. Which would be a real shame, as this is currently the streaming service most closely meeting what I want from a streaming service.

That's it for the September roundup. The main post looking at the "1000 true fans" model from the fan point of view will be along in the next couple of days, and that's one you really won't want to miss.