Steve Knopper

Music Examiner
Steve Knopper [knopps.com] covers the music business for Rolling Stone. His next book, on the record business in the digital age, is due from Free Press/Simon & Schuster in January 2009.

  

National Examiners

Kyle Busch
Automotive Examiner
Most Recent Post
Driving past the credit freeze
Jay McDonough
Progressive Politics Examiner
Most Recent Post
A PIcture for the Day
Sakre Heinze
Tori Amos Examiner
Most Recent Post
Remembering the American Doll Posse Tour
Find the Examiners
writing about your
favorite topics.

Old fart needs new music

April 9, 8:47 AM
by Steve Knopper, Music Examiner
 
 
As a 39-year-old still stuck in the Dinosaur Land of buying music on little pieces of plastic, I'm finding it harder and harder to discover new songs. There's so much good stuff on the Internet, and tracking it all via MySpace, blogs, eMusic, iTunes, podcasts and Internet radio requires more time than I have or obsessive-compulsive disorder (which, OK, I have, a little, especially when it comes to music, but I'm trying to get over it).

What I really, really want is some kind of new-music sampler, from a trusted source like Pitchfork or Rolling Stone or Spin or the Village Voice, which I can shift to my iPod and listen to while walking or driving or what-not. I realize tons of blogs, etc., make free downloads available all the time, but the crucial thing is the quality control.

A few sites come close:

Hypemachine: Aggregates the really good music blogs (like Stereogum) into an endless, easy-to-use playlist. I found gems this way, like a smoky version of the Moody Blues' "Knights In White Satin" by Midnight Movies; tracks from a Rolling Stones outtakes album (Metamorphosis) that I'd somehow never heard of and promptly bought on CD; and Of Montreal's bouncy, old-school-power-pop "Friends of Mine." The problem is the  service emphasizes streaming -- MP3s are available via iTunes or Amazon, but that makes the process cumbersome.

Pitchfork's Forkcast: The indie-rock critics here select some 230 hip new songs, from rapper Lil Wayne to rocker Jay Reatard, and stream them with a clunky little player. The tracks are super-awesome, just as you'd expect from Pitchfork, but again, this is a streaming deal, so I have to listen via work computer. (The playlist is powered by imeem, which posts other playlists in the same style, but still, no downloading.) 8.8. (Little Pitchfork joke.)

Last.fm's free downloads: Again, mostly a streaming/radio site, but this page compiles a really good list of free, available MP3s -- Sufjan Stevens' "Christmas In July" is here, as well as tracks by the aforementioned Of Montreal, Broken Social Scene and (!) Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You." These, you can download.

And then, yes, there's P2P, which I'm avoiding, not because it's, y'know, illegal, but because most of these services, like BitTorrent, are cumbersome and the quality control drives me crazy. Suggestions welcome!
   Subscribe   Feed

Comments

Name:  
Email Address:  
Comments:  

More from Music Examiner

Clive Davis and the music biz

April 24, 1:32 PM
Last summer I tracked down a copy of Clive, the out-of-print 1975 book by veteran music-business mogul Clive Davis, on Amazon for something like $35. (I see three copies now for as low as $9.91, so the joke's on me.) He wrote it shortly after then-extremely-powerful... Read More

Danny Federici, secret weapon, RIP

April 18, 8:42 AM
Crap. The first member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band to die is keyboardist Danny Federici. Check out the end of that March 20 concert video on The Boss' site -- I think Bruce whispers "My brother" to him, but I'm not sure. In any case,... Read More

Hooray for volume!

April 17, 9:38 AM
Man, I hope XM and Sirius merge -- and lower the monthly subscription prices! I've been paying $12.95 a month for a year for XM, which I absolutely love. My favorite channel is The Rhyme, an old-school hip-hop extravaganza that plays a great song every... Read More

Speaking of Jolene

April 17, 9:14 AM
Dolly has been singing "Jolene" live for some time -- my wife and I saw her do it about two years ago at the Denver Convention Center. (For the record, her best song there was Tommy James and the Shondells' "Crimson and Clover," in... Read More

Not really dumb, not really blonde

April 15, 10:12 AM
Spent a great, relaxing Sunday catching up on new music and watching the Tigers and Kenny Rogers get crushed.Here's a review of the first one. More coming soon.Dolly Parton, Backwoods Barbie. Good for Dolly for ditching her record label(s) and putting... Read More

My teams suck

April 15, 10:11 AM
Why couldn't I have picked the Yankees as "my team"? Or the Celtics?No, I grew up in Detroit, so am stuck with the Tigers. (It's getting to be an obsession -- every day there's some new injury to Google-news: Joel Zumaya, Fernando Rodney, Curtis... Read More

What isn't funny about the comics

April 15, 10:11 AM
Every morning, my 5-year-old wants to read Heart of the City and Family Circus in our morning newspaper. She likes the strips with characters close to her age who sort of talk like she does. So every day I read them to her, and she stares blankly and... Read More

Stones, dude

April 9, 3:27 PM
So, Metamorphosis. How could I have missed this one? Amazon says it's the only Stones' rarities collection, rushed into print by ex-manager Allen Klein after a lawsuit. Of course I know "Heart of Stone," but the rest are new to me. I'm not... Read More

Hey everybody

April 8, 11:45 AM
Thanks to coaxing (and one excellent free lunch) from my pal Gil, I'm the new Music Examiner on this site. I'll be writing about music I like, where to find it, occasional music-business issues and various personal crap.By way of introduction: I cover... Read More