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Tuesday, September 26, 2006
According to this BBC story, a new report from Jupiter Research shows that - on average - iPod owners purchase relatively few tracks from iTunes. Instead, they're stocking them with tracks ripped from CDs and from file-sharing sites. (But no mention of mp3 blogs!)
I haven't read the full Jupiter report ($750) so I don't know exactly what it implies about all of the non-iTunes tracks on iPods. But I sometimes wonder if such analysis fully accounts for the sheer volume of music that is legitimately given away these days - the free tracks on band and label websites, authorized promo sites, etc. The pickings are slim for major label artists, yet anyone who listens to indie artists has a lot of free music to choose from.
To gauge the availability of authorized free music, I took a quick look to see how many of the top 30 albums from a recent CMJ airplay chart have at least one free and legal mp3 available. I didn't want to search all day, so I stuck to band and label sites, Better Propaganda (legal mp3 promo site), and Insound and Amp Camp (online retailers that give away label-authorized mp3s). Because I generally refuse to save any mp3s encoded at less than 128k, I didn't count anything below that cutoff. And to make sure I was dealing solely with label- or artist-authorized content, I stayed away from mp3 blogs.
It didn't take long track down legal downloads for 19 of the 30 albums. I already knew that free tracks are out there for M. Ward and Yo La Tengo, the top two artists on the chart. Six of the remaining 28 are available at Better Propaganda, seven more can be found at Insound, Amp Camp has a Mew track, and you can download a
couple of Hellogoodbye tracks at the band's Myspace page. Ditto for the Velvet Teen at the Slowdance Records site and Michael Franti and Spearhead at the Anti Records site. Cursive would've made the list, but Saddle Creek only posts cheapo 64k mp3 files on its site.
Here are the top 30 album from issue 978 of the CMJ New Music Report. The links are to pages with label-authorized mp3 files:
Actually, I was expecting a slightly-higher hit rate -- maybe with a broader search I could've tracked down free downloads for some of the remaining albums. As you'd expect, most of the discs without freebies are major label releases. If I ran the same test for the top 30 Billboard albums, I'd probably end up with zero free tracks. Even so, there's plenty of good free music out there to fill your iPod, and the RIAA can't say thing about it. Not all of the above tracks do it for me, but there's some great stuff on this list.
- by David Harrell
posted by Alex
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