RECOMMENDED SITES
not necessarily having much
if anything
to do with free and legal MP3s per se

Music Sites These are the sites I go to most often when I want to discover new music, learn more about the music I'm discovering, check on obscure musical facts about music I already know, and otherwise feast on more musical information than I can possibly keep in my head at any given time. Wikipedia More and more when I am looking for some basic biographical information and an easy to access discography, I turn to the user-written, general-purpose, ad-free web-based encyclopedia Wikipedia. Not that Wikipedia will have information on every last obscure band or musician, but the breadth is pretty impressive, and on Wikipedia the writing is fact-based rather than opinion-based, which is a breath of fresh air here on the web. You can either go to the main page and search, or simply type in the name of the band or person you're looking for (use an underscore mark between names) right after the "wiki/" part of the URL and you'll go right to the article you're looking for. All Music Guide While still the de facto bible of musician information on the internet, All Music has lost some of its luster over the years as it's gotten bogged down both in a clunky, error-prone design and in deeply erratic writing. It's still about the best place to go to uncover background on obscure musicians, but I'm finding Wikipedia (see above) to be far more user-friendly and useful in most cases. Metacritic (music portion) This site assigns a number between 1 (very very bad) and 100 (very very good) to individual albums, based on the reviews the album has gotten in a variety of media outlets, both mainstream and offbeat. The system is inherently shaky but the site is an informative visit if you'd like to get a general feel for how the critics regard a given CD. The Rest Is Noise (Alex Ross blog) This is the opposite of a comprehensive music site, and just about the opposite of a rock'n'roll music site as well. But for those with a strong sense of intellectual curiosity and a vague suspicion that maybe, just maybe, we don't want to ditch 400 years of music history just because we tend to like instruments that we have to plug in, Alex Ross is your man. A music critic at The New Yorker, Ross is one of the few (if not the only) music critic alive who is equally comfortable writing about both classical and popular music. His blog largely concerns classical, but not entirely. Plus there are links here to his articles on popular musicians, including an excellent article he wrote on Radiohead back in 2001. Trouser Press For a crucial 10 years in the history of left-of-center rock'n'roll, the NYC-based magazine Trouser Press was on the scene, a literate and passionate alternative to the more grandiose (and ever more mainstream) Rolling Stone. Once the magazine died in 1984, Trouser Press lived on in a series of record guides, including 1983's pioneering Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records and its more comprehensive follow-up, The New Trouser Press Record Guide (1985). Two more updates of the record guide were published in 1989 and 1991, followed by The Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock in 1997. Together, the contents of these record guides comprise the backbone of the Trouser Press web site--but, happily, in recent years, more and more has been added to the site to make it a reasonably thorough--if intermittently arrogant--resource for not-quite-mainstream rock'n'roll from the late '60s through to the current decade. The Ectophiles Guide to Good Music Ecto started as a mailing list for people who were really into the music of Happy Rhodes (if you don't know her, don't worry, she's got kind of a cult following), but quickly branched out into a discussion of other, somewhat similar (and more appealing, I might add!) artists (Kate Bush and Jane Siberry became big Ecto "goddesses" early on). Over time discussion there branched out further, prompting at one point or another the creation and ongoing development of this highly involving and informative web site.

Listening Sites The internet offers a mind-boggling array of listening options, from full-fledged radio stations to hundreds upon thousands upon gazillions of podcasts. To me the options are so superabundant that I can barely be bothered to investigate them, if that makes sense. And to tell you truth, between robotically programmed online radio stations and ineptly hosted podcasts, I think that the vast majority of listening choices online are not very satisfying to someone like me, who needs real people who know how to put together quality radio if I'm going to get excited about it. That said, I have certainly found a few places online that offer interesting and well-presented online music to listen to. Here they are: 89.3 The Current The Current came to life in Feb. '05, courtesy of the folks at Minnesota Public Radio. It describes itself as playing "the best, authentic new music alongside music that explores roots and influences." Check out the playlist and you'll see that this is one cool station. KCRW Southern California's legendary "adult-alternative" station has a wide variety of listening options, both live and archived. KCRW gives you the option of listening to the station as it is being broadcast on the airwaves at that moment, or listening to a special music-only internet version of the station, or listening to any of a broad array of archived shows. There is also, now, a page for available podcasts. Radio Paradise From a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Radio Paradise aims high--nothing less than the rebirth of free-form rock'n'roll radio, on the internet. This is the first radio station I've come across in, maybe, decades, that I can put on and leave on all day: the variety is impressive, the sets are programmed by actual human beings, and there aren't even any commercials. I don't know how they do it, but they do. Thanks to visitor Steve for the recommendation; Radio Paradise is a keeper. Pandora An engaging, unique site, Pandora is based upon something the founders call the Music Genome Project, which was launched in 2000 with the almost insane goal of analyzing popular music, song by song, to pick out the underlying attributes (or "genes") of what, together, comprise "the unique and magical musical identity of a song," as the web site reports. Just the sort of thing I'd normally run in the opposite direction from, but based on my experience with Pandora, I think these guys are onto something. Yes, it's another place you can create a "radio station" but this one may be superior to its competitors for a few reasons. First, this is not simply a glorified playlist; it is not in any way based on songs you already have on your computer. Second, Pandora can surprise you: you don't just plug in your favorite artists and songs and have the same things play over and over; instead, you plug in some artists and songs and many other artists and songs will arise as you listen. Finally, Pandora's choices are not based on genre or on what other people who like this song or this artist also like; they are based simply and purely on what the music sounds like. What a concept. But there's one major drawback here, to my ears. While they allow you to continue to add artists and songs to the list that "seeds" your station, what emerges over time is not a free-flowing mix but ongoing blocks of four songs each revolving around one of your "seed" artists. This is weird, and unsatisfying--there should be a way to mix the songs all together; instead, I get four songs from artists that are similar to Ron Sexsmith, then four songs from artists similar to Bjork, and so on. This seems dopey. That said, the songs that do come up are usually pretty good. So if you go over there and feel like signing up (it's free, although there's also a paid option), check out Fingertips Radio at http://www.pandora.com/people/fingertipsmusic. I hope they continue to improve the system. WOXY.com The world's only terrestial radio station to go out of business but find refuge (so far) on the web, WOXY.com used to a Cincinnati-area FM station known as 97X; it had its moment of pop-cultural fame in the movie "Rain Man," when Dustin Hoffman's character latched onto the station's slogan ("97X, the future of rock'n'roll") and kept repeating it, as he was wont to do. An early adopter of the so-called "modern rock" FM radio format, back in 1983, 97X always presented one of the better incarnations of that format because it was always independent--programmed by its actual staff rather than outside consultants. That all seemed to come to an end in January 2004, when the station owners sold the frequency to a Dallas-based conglomerate. But the rights to the 97X name and format remained with the WOXY folks, who hoped to continue as an internet radio station. After nearly failing before they began due to lack of funding, the station found investors in July '04 and went back online, only to disappear for a month or two in 2006, again for lack of funds. This time it was put back in business by Lala.com (see "Interesting Retail Sites," below) and so far things seem hunky dory again. KEXP This is a Seattle-based public radio station that was bought in 2001 by Paul Allen and is affiliated in with his Experience Music Project, an interactive music museum built in Seattle in the late '90s. Apparently it was something of a controversy when he bought KCMU and changed the call letters, and for all I know people up there may still be annoyed, but what the heck, the station seems pretty good to me. Radio Indie Pop Registration is now required here, which may be a downside for some, but I think it's worth it to access this refreshingly simple, musically engaging web radio station. Once you log in, you face a simple screen, make a choice about what you want to hear and boom, you're listening--there's no fiddling with the technology, no need for downloading extra software or even opening a media player of some sort. I like that. Radio Indie Pop has expanded over time: in addition to the main channel, there is now a channel spotlighting an unsigned artist, another channel featuring a worthy debut release from a new artist, an Alt-Country channel, a "Retro Underground" channel, and (go figure) an all-Ramones channel, along with two slots for new channels yet to be announced. The main channel has a weekly schedule: two days of "introspective" indie rock, two days of "melodic" indie rock, two days of "loud" indie rock, and one "eclectic" day mixing dream pop, shoegaze, and electronic stuff; you can choose, however, which day you want to listen to at any point. The biggest downside here to my taste is that the music plays endlessly without any human being to host it all, but as a rule the music is good enough for me to feel comfortable recommending it. Shifted Sound Shifted Sound is a weekly podcast featuring good quality independent and small-label music of a similar sort to that which I write about here. The 45-or-so-minute podcasts are hosted by the friendly and knowledgeable Shelby Miller. The web site keeps you posted each week on the songs played, and offers links to the artists' sites.

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