FineTune.com

FineTune.com -- this is what epitonic.com could have become. FineTune has it all, shared playlists, regular radio, music preference based radio, and a huge catalog. I'm waiting to see how this will play out -- it's hard to imagine someone being faster than Pandora at getting new music in the catalog. And musicovery has that multi-directional next button. They're all good.

Far From Showbiz net label

Netlabels.org pointed me to this recent release on the Far From Showbiz net label: Dark ambient, drone, martial... and many more delights here.

Darkness and Silence:
Semper Fidelis
Occidit, Occidit Spes Omnis

soundZcapa:
The Night Of The Accident

Brian Eno Installation

Saw this story about Brian Eno's installation at the Venice Biennale.

DJ Tiesto video

Saw this video on StumbleUpon videos... this is a performance last year by DJ Tiesto at a music award show in the Netherlands. The best part of the video comes early -- somebody holding up a sign for their grandmother to see on TV. Am I missing something, or do DJ's just not get this kind of respect here on these Pacific shores?

Dave's Imaginary Sound Space

Dave's Imaginary Sound Space found this earhead blog six months before I found him. There's probably many cool Windows Live Spaces out there, but this is the first one I've noticed, and it will save me a lot of time to keep checking in with his lists. Many useful music related links and a lot of web 2 goodness too. Make sure to check out his media distribution list.

FilterMusic.net

FilterMusic is a net radio portal that sorts radio stations by genre. It doubles as a screen saver, with a feed of beautiful and dramatic background images (scroll down to get the "full screen effect").

Very useful.

Milhaven

I heard Milhaven on Bleepwatch. They're a German post rock band that released their EP I.M. Wagner this past November. Long, lovely sounds, and starting with a song about the Pacific Ocean that sounded like they'd be right at home playing here at Ocean Beach.

Oh! Great Pacific

Clean Room

Milhaven has an earlier release, which includes this song with an Apocalypse Now! theme:
Bars Closing Down: Drink A Pint Of Blood A Day

Musicovery

Stumbled upon Musicovery today. Sorry for the old news -- just in case someone else missed it too...

Musicovery is what you get when you combine LivePlasma (music mapping) and Pandora (musically mapped radio). Just pick a mood (or a genre) to turn on your radio channel. Your channel is illustrated with a map of "nearby" tracks. Instead of clicking the next button, click on any of the nearby tracks.

Getting lost on the map is too cool. If I'm not careful I might miss Xmas.

Heard on Bahgheera's Orbit

Another highlight from Bahgheera's Orbit...:

A big beautiful sound...
The Big Sleep: Sleepy Kid Waltz

Recording Industry News

Three stories about the RIAA this week made me lose even more respect for them -- I know... I am occasionally given cause to pitch music CD's here, but how can anybody buy music in good conscience anymore, when they know it puts money in these pirates pockets?

The RIAA is pressing forward in this case against children... whatever happened to the old "slap on the wrist"??? With all this talk of protecting the works of musicians, I find it ironic that the RIAA is now lobbying to reduce payments to artists. This response from songwriters makes an interesting read. And finally, about claims the RIAA makes about loss due to illegally downloaded music, the RIAA is balking at a judges order to justify their claimed loss.

So the world turns... meanwhile, remember to support musicians by attending their shows and buying their merchandise... from them!

TuneGlue vs LivePlasma

TuneGlue, another musical preferences mapping service, hit the news last week. TuneGlue draws on data from last.fm and amazon.com. I saw it mentioned on The Music Weblog and Hypebot. I can't really see much difference between that and LivePlasma, which in addition to mapping out "music that sounds like <your preference>" also maps out movies and directors that draw on similar viewer preferences.

I think LivePlasma takes the trophy home though... when I search Sigur Rós on LivePlasma, it points out a newish compilation CD from Iceland that looks interesting. That might make a nice Xmas stocking stuffer for someone.

Music for Christmas

Just 12 days 'til Christmas... it's high time for a thematic post, and what better place to start but with the Messiah himself...

Dan Sindel shares a multi-track solo guitar spectacular:
Exerpts from Handel's Messiah

It's a San Francisco tradition -- we go to Ocean Beach and watch the surf. Surely, it's a perfect moment for some Pollo Del Mar seasonal surf sounds:
Carol of the Bells

New computer for Christmas? Watch out, Robert Lund sings a scary Elves Gone Wild tale by Spaff:
Nuttin' But Spam

Need more Christmas musical goodness? Starfrosch offers a music video tour of Santa's new digs, there's some pretty cool electro-Christmas mashup music there too.

OWL: Find Music Through Music

Yet another cool tool for music discovery: OWL. Pick any MP3 file from your collection, upload it to OWL, pick the bit of the track that makes it special to you... and it will search it's database of Creative Commons shared works, and recommend music with similar sounds. I tried two tracks and was very impressed by what it found -- some of it was stuff I already knew I liked, but there was a lot of stuff I hadn't heard before.

Get an account before you upload your music. The process of uploading and picking the bit you like takes a bit of time. I wanted to start organizing my search results right away, but I couldn't because I hadn't signed up yet.

tribalmixes.org

I was lost at tribalmixes.org for a few days... the first time I've dabbled in P2P (peer to peer) BitTorrent style downloading, so it took awhile to adjust. For e.g., there's no preview, so you must download, and you pay for downloads either with money, or by sharing them with other downloaders. Now I'm sharing a dozen mixes (or, in bittorrent speak: I have a dozen torrents seeded), I can see which files I'm uploading to other downloaders at any time.

About 40 contributers upload 50 new mixes a day to tribalmixes. All club music DJ mixes, some of them mixes for tribalmixes radio. There's also an interesting positive participation/contribution "immortality rating" system that encourages you to particpate.

If P2P sounds like too much work -- there's still podcasts and the radio programs. In addition to Flower Powder, Armando Rossi, from Australia, has caught my attention:

Armando Rossi: Tribalmixes podcast #9

Find out all you need to know about BitTorrent at Wiki.thePPN.

Psytrance Day

I returned to listen to an old favorite today, Flower Powder, who keep a great collection of DJ mixes on their blog. They also perform live mixes psystream radio and tribalmixes radio. Other psytrance radio I like is the Digitally Imported chillout channel, and HBR1.

A recent Flower Powder mix from the Chill Bill series on tribal mixes:

Flower Powder: Chill Bill #3

Bleepwatch

I stumbled upon Bleepwatch today -- I think bleep must be short for "net label release," because that's what it watches. There are lots of treasures to find here... heard these among today's releases:

VS: Silencio

Atomic Death Circle: Travel Beyond C / Chapel of Light

Monoton: Cycklamat

Dirty On Purpose

In keeping with yesterday's theme about radio... here's a funny video I spotted on FreeIndie.Com.

Dirty On Purpose - No Radio

Hear more music from Dirty On Purpose here.

The Internet Killed The Radio Star

I remember the last time I listened to music on the radio -- it was the day Clear Channel banned John Lennon's "Imagine" from the airwaves in 2001. Six years later, people are starting to accept the fact that we can listen to what we want to listen to here on the internet, and the RIAA can't stop it by suing music fans. The Transmit conference in Vancouver, Canada, last weekend discussed themes about the future of music:

...music fans are slowly but surely regaining control over the music industry, and hearing music the way people did 30 years ago - purely by recommendation...

Read about it on 24hrs and canoe.ca.