Now playing
May. 23rd, 2005 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenOr, Today I ar' bin mostly listenin' to...
An interesting new game, or if you prefer, way to expand your musical horizons.
A while ago I added a new webcomic to the collection of bookmark-tabs that I read at the start of all but the most hectic of days. It's Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques, AKA![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
qcjeph. It's a splendid strip, a wry observation of life as a disaffected indie-kid. It may not be me but I find it hauntingly reminiscent of every single one of you that posted a little elegy to John Peel, back when. I may have said this before, in fact.
One amusing aspect of it is the regularity with which the characters drop in the names of (to me) obscure bands. If Marten and his mates talk about it, then it's virtually a given that I've never heard of them. [Yet they are probably already too passé forsparktastic. :¬) ]
But following some recent geeky conversations, I had a thought.
(The theme of these conversations is, largely, this:
The days of free P2P filesharing may be coming to an end, for now. The big media companies are dinosaurs, I think, and their days are numbered - and they know it. The writing is on a great many walls and it is large and clear. The whole world's getting the internet, computers capable of flinging digital media files around like they're 2K of ASCII text and cheap pocket-sized things to play it on. Selling media is a dead-end market.
But these are big rich companies, for now, and they have governments wrapped round their little finger. So the Man will make the free filesharing networks illegal and the access providers, running scared, will shut off access to them. It'll go underground and be harder to do - the plaything of geeks, meaning that the millions of free files out there will sink out of sight.)
But for now, it's still there. Don't get Kazaa unless you actively want to cripple your PC with spyware.mr_flay recommends Poisoned, but it never worked well for me. A friend & client WINOLJ (AFAIK) recommended Limewire instead and for me this works a treat.
So, recently, I've gone back to #1 of Questionable Content and read through the whole sequence - it's only been going a couple of years - and made a note of every band mentioned.
There are quite a few. Go on then, pop quiz, how many of these do you know?
Even the ones of these I've dimly heard of, I couldn't name a single track, hum it, cite a phrase of lyrics or recognize it if I heard it. Not even Jimmy Eat World, who I have actually listened to.
Also mentioned, but somewhere between nostalgically and very disparagingly:
So what I've been doing is, harvesting all these names, sticking 'em into Limewire and grabbing as many MP3s of each one as are being shared by more than, say, 3 people. You get a sort of instant top-ten of each band that way: the most popular tracks are the ones shared by most people. Then I point Winamp at the folder and tell it to random-play whatever it finds. There's some good stuff - and an awful lot of extreme guitar noise, but I'm still working my way down the list.
I wonder if I do this enough, I'll miraculously become musically cultured and sophisticated and be able to eruditely discuss matters musical?
An interesting new game, or if you prefer, way to expand your musical horizons.
A while ago I added a new webcomic to the collection of bookmark-tabs that I read at the start of all but the most hectic of days. It's Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques, AKA
qcjeph. It's a splendid strip, a wry observation of life as a disaffected indie-kid. It may not be me but I find it hauntingly reminiscent of every single one of you that posted a little elegy to John Peel, back when. I may have said this before, in fact.One amusing aspect of it is the regularity with which the characters drop in the names of (to me) obscure bands. If Marten and his mates talk about it, then it's virtually a given that I've never heard of them. [Yet they are probably already too passé for
sparktastic. :¬) ]But following some recent geeky conversations, I had a thought.
(The theme of these conversations is, largely, this:
The days of free P2P filesharing may be coming to an end, for now. The big media companies are dinosaurs, I think, and their days are numbered - and they know it. The writing is on a great many walls and it is large and clear. The whole world's getting the internet, computers capable of flinging digital media files around like they're 2K of ASCII text and cheap pocket-sized things to play it on. Selling media is a dead-end market.
But these are big rich companies, for now, and they have governments wrapped round their little finger. So the Man will make the free filesharing networks illegal and the access providers, running scared, will shut off access to them. It'll go underground and be harder to do - the plaything of geeks, meaning that the millions of free files out there will sink out of sight.)
But for now, it's still there. Don't get Kazaa unless you actively want to cripple your PC with spyware.
mr_flay recommends Poisoned, but it never worked well for me. A friend & client WINOLJ (AFAIK) recommended Limewire instead and for me this works a treat.So, recently, I've gone back to #1 of Questionable Content and read through the whole sequence - it's only been going a couple of years - and made a note of every band mentioned.
There are quite a few. Go on then, pop quiz, how many of these do you know?
- Opeth
- Mastodon
- Slayer (well, yes, all right, of course)
- Isis
- The Blood Brothers
- Sigur Ros (heard of, not heard)
- Karen O
- Interpol
- Surfjan Stevens (drew a near-blank here)
- Flaming Lips
- Creed
- The Arcade Fire
- Red House Painters
- Helmet
- Slint
- Wilco
- Iron & Wine
- Jimmy Eat World (seen on posters; kept a bunch that tamaranth ripped on my PCs a couple of years back)
- Fiery Furnaces
- Guided By Voices
- Bright Eyes
- The Walkmen
- Autolux
- Failure
- Built To Spill
- The Unicorns
- Modest Mouse (rings a very distant bell)
- Hum
- Poster Children
- The Wrens
- Seam
- June of '44
- Mogwai (well, duh, yeah, but they're locals to me. I'm guessing they're fashionably unknown over the water)
- Old Man Gloom
- Tibetan Freedom Concert
- South By Southwest
- Hold Steady
Even the ones of these I've dimly heard of, I couldn't name a single track, hum it, cite a phrase of lyrics or recognize it if I heard it. Not even Jimmy Eat World, who I have actually listened to.
Also mentioned, but somewhere between nostalgically and very disparagingly:
- Slipknot
- Good Charlotte
- Type O Negative
- Lynyrd Skynyrd
So what I've been doing is, harvesting all these names, sticking 'em into Limewire and grabbing as many MP3s of each one as are being shared by more than, say, 3 people. You get a sort of instant top-ten of each band that way: the most popular tracks are the ones shared by most people. Then I point Winamp at the folder and tell it to random-play whatever it finds. There's some good stuff - and an awful lot of extreme guitar noise, but I'm still working my way down the list.
I wonder if I do this enough, I'll miraculously become musically cultured and sophisticated and be able to eruditely discuss matters musical?
