Pigs refuse to OiNK!

Thousands mourn on websites such as the Oink Memorial Blog over the recent death of the best service for sharing pristine independent (and other) music. The quality, variety, and speed of files once shared over OiNK was galaxies beyond any other service that I have experienced and the forums held a close knit community more knowledgeable about music than that of any other digital community that I have witnessed.

According to Britain’s Telegraph.co.uk, the website was shut down in a raid by British and Dutch police. Quite a bit of false information regarding the site has been stated by police reports. For instance, Police claimed that OiNK was targeted because it was a site where users paid to download illegal music from their servers; in actuality, OiNK was a free torrent tracker. There was no cost at all. The only requirements for membership were that you were invited by a friend, log in every once in a while, and keep a good share radio by uploading a reasonable amount of files in comparison to the amount of files you are downloading. They even had a strictly enforced policy against selling membership invites. The only exchange of money was an option of donating to help them pay for the costs of running the server. Also, police said that they hosted illegal music on their site. In reality, they were hosting a forum for sharing torrent files.

Somehow the IFPI, which seems to be the international version of the RIAA, managed to hijack the oink.cd domain and replace it with a threatening message claiming “a criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site's users.” Due to the nature of private trackers, it should prove simple find the identities of the 180,000 OiNK users.

I still fail to see the motivation behind killing off individual file-share communities when new ones will always crop up in their place. Major label resistance to the evolution of their market is confounding. File-sharing should be seen as an incredible and free means of marketing their products. Independent record labels often realize this and leak records online before their release in order to generate hype for their artists. And it works.

Like many younger people who have grown up with computers, I don’t watch TV or listen to the radio. This leads me to believe record sales are dropping because labels are relying on antiquated and failing venues for promotion, while alienating their potential customers by shutting down sites that young people use to find new music. I attend countless concerts a year, donate to bands, and buy records. Yet, I rarely buy an album without downloading it first for free. With more than 30,000 large scale album releases per year, I simply cannot afford to purchase them all. So, if it comes down to me buying only forty albums a year, then why wouldn’t I check all the music that sounds intriguing and pay for the albums I really like? I appreciate this ability to preview albums enough to say that I doubt I will ever feel comfortable buying an album from a member of the RIAA or IFPI again. Maybe the won a little bit; I won’t download their albums illegally, but it is only because I have no interest in buying them or supporting their artists.

That said, go buy Jens Lekman’s albums. They are fantastic. http://www.jenslekman.com/discography.htm He has a sweet little message about filesharing on the bottom of his page.

Soulseek for Mac

There are plenty of options for sharing well-known music free of charge. However, when looking for less known music, your choices dwindle. I have found the fastest file-sharing technology to be Bittorrent. Unfortunately, torrent sites rarely have much music unless you are looking for Madonna’s discography. Oink and IndieTorrents are amazing torrent sharing networks but they have strict ratio requirements and joining is by invite only. So, where is the best place to go if you don’t want to worry about ratios or invites? My answer has been the same for the last six years: Soulseek.

Soulseek is an ad-free, software-based, peer-to-peer fileshare program that relies on a central server to connect users. The program has always been slightly unstable and slower than programs such as Limewire. Why is it so great then? The answer is simple: the users. Soulseek’s original users primarily shared electronic music such as IDM, glitch, Ambient, Noise, and Breakcore. From 2000 to 2004 the network of users grew rapidly and a vast amount of relatively obscure indie, hip-hop, and hardcore punk music was put up on the network.

Why did so many people opt to use a unstable, slow program? I believe that most of the original appeal came from a single, very simple feature. Soulseek allowed users to download folders. Because of this, most Soulseek users organized their albums in folders and were able to download entire albums. This may not seem like a big deal today when torrent sites let you download organized albums with great speed, but at the time it was huge.

If you are using a PC you can download Soulseek at http://www.slsknet.org. If you are like me and use a Mac, then you have a couple options: Solarseek or SoulseeX. Both of these programs are loaded with plenty of flaws and advantages to make comparing them a fun activity. I am going to break down their different functions and compare them on those points.

Connecting:
Both Mac apps start up faster than the PC version of Soulseek ever did. Solarseek starts up and connects to the server instantly while SoulseeX takes a second.

Interface: SoulseeX is said to be heavily customizable, but I experienced difficulty even changing its color. The program shows no windows when it first launches, forcing you to manually open a window from the drop-down menu at the top of the screen. The primary user functions of the program all take place in seperate windows making the screen cluttered and confusing. Solarseek has a simple, elegant interface that reminds me a lot of familiar programs such as iTunes. There are no options for customization but I personally don’t feel any need to change its appearance. All important options can be accessed from one window.

Searching: SoulseeX groups search results by user and folder making it easier to sort through results. Solarseek does not yet have this functionality. Both programs came up with roughly the same amount of results at the same speed.

Downloading: SolarSeek was surprisingly terrible for the final downloading of files. The current beta of the program does not yet allow downloading folders of full albums. According to the website, full album downloads will be included in the 1.0 version of the program, but it is doubtful that they will have that out anytime soon considering the slow development thus far. Also, I found the program often disconnected and had no option for automatically reconnecting to the server. To make matters worse, Solarseek sometimes gets stuck on songs and downloads them over and over for no apparent reason. SoulseeX simply downloaded the songs and was as reliable at doing so as the original Soulseek.

Reliability: From time to time, SoulseeX doesn’t connect to the server, but when it does connect, it never crashes. SolarSeek is usable, but I have experienced a slightly annoying amount of unexpected crashes from it when searching.

I am hesitant at recommending either of these programs to Mac users, but I tend to use SoulseeX simply for the reliability. If SolarSeek 1.0 ends up having all the features it promises and the reliability that they are claiming it to have, then its release will certainly be an exciting day for Mac SoulSeek users.

I am really hoping for a self-regulating program based on BitTorrent that allows access to the amount of music found on networks such as Oink without invites and the burden of guessing how downloads will affect your share ratio.

Quality vs. Convenience: Online Concerts

Daily, I am bombarded with advertisements for products and services promoting new and exciting ways to work and play from home. With online banking, food delivery, on-demand entertainment, internet courses, instant messaging, telecommuting, and digital media downloads, I see a glamorous future in which no one will ever need to leave her home. If the future goes according to plan, we can all become obese, stagnate slobs with social skills equivalent to those of spotted garden slugs and no one will have to know.

For now, I can still skip to the bank and talk to a teller about my finances, yet I worry what tomorrow will bring when the convenience of digital solutions doesn’t always match the quality of the physical interpersonal interactions it replaces. An example of a lost societal gem is the pay-phone; when the cell phone first came along, people who found being within range of a call at anytime unappealing could continue using pay-phones. Today pay-phones have gone the way of the Po'o-uli and our only option is to carry phones and pay for their service plans.

At the last Iggli blogger meeting, we discussed possible evolutionary paths of online concert experiences. Today, watching a concert online means either picking through a limited selection of prerecorded shows on services such as Fabchannel.com, watching uninspired live performances of major label bands on websites like MySpace, or sifting through millions of low quality camera-phone videos on YouTube. Tomorrow’s experience will likely hold many of the advantages associated with watching any televised event, yet with the potential for much added interactivity. An unlimited amount of people could digitally attend the event and they would not be limited by the burdens of room capacity or geographic location. Everything could easily be stored so people could make the concert fit into their schedule instead of planning their life around the event. The potential for additional bonus features to watching a concert online are limitless.

In the fury of this exciting prospect, I can’t help but wonder if online concerts will serve to excite the masses about live music and, in turn, boost concert attendance or if they will have the opposite effect. I would like to think that people will be able to make decisions factoring in the indispensable human quality of live musical performances. Yet things do not look good for quality in the quality vs. convenience battle when 54 million people are choosing to save a few minutes by eating at McDonalds each day. Continuing in my negativity, receiving postal mail from a friend is still much more satisfying and exciting than receiving an email. Yet, it seems people almost unwaveringly opt for the convenience of email. Sometimes I wonder if Netflix is solely responsible for keeping the US Postal Service afloat.

My predictions is this: dedicated music fans will always support live music and will take advantage of online concerts to find out about new bands and to see shows they would otherwise be unable to attend. However, most people will fall into the arms of convenience and large major label concert attendance will decline. It is doubtful we will hear any complaints from major labels because the majority of the concerts they arrange are built from the ground up to be promotional loss-leaders to boost sales and artist recognition. If record labels have heads on their shoulders and any brains in their heads, they will quickly get on-top of licensing high quality online concert experiences before the the ever-growing, pent-up consumer demand explodes into the establishment of reputable concert sharing networks beyond their control.

Touring Techno

In the 1980s, independent bands painstakingly organized tours by spending hours on phones and mailing out countless 7” vinyl demos and tapes to club owners and booking agents. Most of these demos would see only a brief glimpse of life outside their postal package before finding themselves in landfills across the country. This process was frustrating and time consuming, but it was the only way bands operating outside the scope of major labels could share their music and bridge the various innovative subterranean music scenes developing at the time.

The world became a friendlier place for independent bands with the advent of powerful personal computers in the 1990s. Pioneering indie labels of the 80s, such as Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn’s SST Records and Minor Threat frontperson Ian MacKaye’s Dischord Records, had openly shared their booking experience and contact lists with the rest of the developing independent music community and all that was needed was a more effective way for bands to share their music with venues. Personal computing power attacked this issue on two fronts; they made it possible to make high quality recordings outside of the studio and CD-Rs made it cheaper to send the media out to venues. Although the internet was already in common use during most of the 1990s, nearly all venue owners demanded a physical copy of a band’s music before they would consider booking them. This is where the CD-R was incredibly handy. The CD-R format (originally called CD-WO), developed by Philips and Sony, is highly compatible with standard Audio CD players and was infinitely useful in making smaller quantities of demos. In the past, it would have been considered foolish bothering to make a pressing of under 200 copies of a demo but now it was completely feasible on a low budget.

With the passing of yet another decade, a new paradigm for tour booking has taken hold. By many inhabitants of the 90s, social networking sites were commonly seen as oasises for geeky, middle-aged men to try to get dates. In the present, nearly everyone and their local mall Santa Claus has a MySpace or Facebook account. Venue owners have opted to save a few plastic trees by favoring the use of such sites to listen to bands before booking them. Today, musicians will often wait a mere day or two for an approval or rejection email from a venue instead of taking endless trips to the post office and shipping packages and finally waiting for the booker to feel like making a phone call.

The use of social networking sites does not stop after a show is booked; bands and venue owners alike continue to use the sites to alert potential fans and showgoers of happenings in their areas. On MySpace, people often make bulletins alerting their friends of shows. Bands create profiles sharing their songs, photos, and tour dates with fans. When a band is about to tour into town, the show will appear on the local event page for area codes nearby the venue. The events page can be difficult to use for finding worthwhile shows due to the vast number of musical events happening at any time. But, with a little bit of searching, MySpace can be a useful tool for connecting musicians with music fans. Facebook is a superior environment for communicating with friends, especially in college settings. Unfortunately, they have yet to extend welcoming arms to bands and venues. Facebook events are useful for promoting shows but the network is not yet conducive to connecting promoters and bands.

In decades to come, we will see a further shift to the digital realm in the organization of tours. Great database websites like Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life currently exist to allow a route of finding promoters in distant cities that does not include the hassle of searching through pages and pages of dreadful bands on social networking sites. However, it is going to be a true music-oriented social networking site with tools for contacting appropriate venues and finding touring acts that will connect independent bands and venues in the future.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Wikipedia

It’s conceivable that at the world’s end we will find ourselves in the midst of a fiery duel between Google and the holy Wikimedia Foundation. I try not to think about it too much because picking a victor seems as futile as trying decide who would win in a battle between Batman and Superman. Google is definitely strides ahead in using portable and mobile devices to leap out of the constraints of my laptop. In fact, I find I text Google more than I text half of my friends. Yet, recently, my heart has been falling into the hands of Wikipedia.

(Note: I know that it is strange to compare a search engine with a non-profit encyclopedia but they are both massive suppliers of information and two of the top 10 most visited websites for 2007)

I have been using Wikipedia to fill my head with random knowledge for years. Thanks to Wikipedia I know about radioisotope rockets, Edward Leedskalnin’s coral castle, and far from everything in-between. However, I have been putting Wikipedia to a new use lately; I have been using the gentle white giant to find out about music. How uncool, right? Well, let’s consider it.

Due to their surprisingly well regulated encyclopedic writing standards, Wikipedia is the most bullshit-free and least opinionated digi place to learn about tunes since the early days of Epitonic. I am not saying there is anything wrong with opinionated music sites. In fact, I bask in Pitchfork’s conceitedly assertive reviews more frequently than I remember to eat breakfast and I thrive on every moment of it. That said, sometimes I just want clean cut facts and thats when my love steps in.

A simple search will frequently unveil an overview, history, and discography for nearly any somewhat noteworthy band regardless of what label they were signed to or how many records they sold. Genre links are conveniently placed for finding similar artists and the overview often contains links to their contemporaries. The discography section is utterly amazing. Not only can you see everything they have ever released in a clean manner, you can click on albums to view individual tracks and see credits, track lengths, and positions on charts all around the world for singles. The best part is that you don’t have to see a single advertisement during this process. For an example click here.

Often I’ll hear about a band from a friend and then hop on Wikipedia to learn more. Hours later, I will find I know the history of not only that band but of 20 other bands in their specific music scene. Is it perfect? No. Although there are regulations and most band pages follow them, some pages fall below my quality standards. From time to time you will find factual errors and typos. This is frustrating yet to be expected from a user updated website. Luckily, sources are typically cited so if all else fails, you can still use Wikipedia as a dandy diving board to leap to other relevant sites.

My biggest complaint is that you can rarely listen to the music you are reading about. I know there would probably be legal issues with putting music samples on a site like Wikipedia but it sure would be helpful. I suppose for now we have to settle for the sometimes clunky process of downloading the artists on our favorite P2P sites to decide if we like their music. It may or may not be legal, but using the internet to catch wind of bands you would never have heard about otherwise sure isn’t morally wrong.

Check it: Wikipedia /

Bad Weather California

It’s not uncommon to hear critics of mainstream hollywood-centric musical acts complain that the record charts are constantly smothered by musicians with big personalities and a substance halfway in-between flour and fluff for music. One can easy become disheartened and believe musical quality and integrity exist solely in a world devoid of artistic personality. Knowingly or not, Denver’s Bad Weather California is poised to prove these skeptics wrong. Singer-songwriter Chris Adolf births engaging, personality filled sets that flow more like a conversation with a close friend than a traditional rock show. In fact, his rambling in-between songs can often be so intriguing that the showgoer hardly notices that he has stopped playing until, like a practiced indie-rock ninja, he leaps back into his heartfelt songs plowing though tales of love, politics, religion, and celebrations of strength and life.

Chris Adolf’s trembling yet familiar voice rings of authentic passion with every word he sings. This level of authenticity would be impossible to fake and he seems well aware. Although, Bad Weather California (FKA The Love Letter Band) has been crafting songs and performing for years, Chris rarely plays his old hits. The songs that matter to him and the songs that are relevant now pour out and his small yet dedicated fanbase seems to appreciate his approach.

In recent months, Bad Weather California has sprouted into a four piece band, but don’t expect to hear them playing their songs as they are found on the most recent and wordily titled album, Fear Not My Brothers, Fear Not My Sisters, For I Have Seen The Future. The band’s live show celebrates its life as a separate entity with a meandering trek through western soundscapes, engaging, energetic folk-punk inspired vocals, and hip-shaking dance-rock grooves. At times the songs seem as easily distracted and curious as an ADHD child’s daydreams, but, against all odds, they tend to form a uniquely cohesive whole. Despite the menagerie of musical changes, experiments, and sonic curiosities in BWC’s live show, the listener rarely gets left behind.

Check it: Bad Weather California /