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Photo (c) 2008 Brian Voth
For the last few decades, I've used free software of several different kinds. Free software means they give it away free. Shareware means you can use it but a donation is expected or appreciated. Postcard/beerware means you buy the author a beer or send them a postcard. And open source means you can look at the insides of the computer program you're downloading to make sure it's not a virus or insecure.
What this has to do with metal is that there's a rising group of artists who are simply giving away their material. Since many people are now getting their music via MP3s anyway, it makes some sense to skip the drama of finding a label and printing CDs and instead, just fork the stuff out the door. Right now these pioneers are a ragged lot, but I expect other and bigger bands will follow.
Free music is a great promotional tool. Also, if you come up with something too risque for your record label, you can hand it out the door for free and no one gets blamed. Even better, people are out there trolling for free music and many of them like the idea that it's legal. So this is a good way to get some fans.
Here are some of those pioneers:
- Abhorrence was an old school Finnish death metal band and precursor to Amorphis, and they've put online their old demos so you can enjoy them without an Official(tm) label release.
- Fireaxe. Brian Voth started his band in the 1990s and has been giving away CDs, tapes and MP3s ever since. Now on his fifth album, his one-man band Fireaxe plays traditional heavy metal with progressive and power metal elements, sound like a cross between Mercyful Fate, Manowar and Dream Theatre.
- Demilich. This foundational progressive death metal band were first reviled, then adored by the underground. In between events however their album went out of print and has had questionable status in reprints since. However, the band decided enough was enough and are giving it away -- in both MP3 and the lossless FLAC format that allows you to burn an exact duplicate of the original CD.
- Severed Fifth. This band is created under the Open Source idea of giving away the music so others can modify it and upload their versions. The progenitor of this band, Jono Bacon, is community director at Ubuntu, a popular open-source operating system. The style here is more modern metal.
- Mikael Lind. This guy is not metal but might as well be. He found an old piano at his girlfriend's house and recorded 20 variations on classical themes, some of which are very metal in that "stormy classical with a modern vibe" sense. He's a good example of how to do free music the right way.
- Mysticum. Esoteric black metal band Mysticum have made their first album available free in mp3 format. Their underground cred makes this an even more interesting move, since we see the most misanthropic and withdrawn of humans giving away free music -- as if they liked us, or some of us, or something.
Those are the bigger bands. How about giving the little guys a chance -- the download's free, you can hear it and delete it if you think it's crap. Call it "musical natural selection." Try some smaller bands using the lists others have made of free and legal metal downloads. Here's a good list of threads on internet forums where people list free and/or open source metal material:
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