Musical Musings

i've been obsessed with music for the last couple of weeks. i recently discovered soulseek, which has become my personal wet dream. *real* music fans congregate there. unlike the brittany spears kiddies on kazaa, they share good music. they also organize their music into folders, tag the songs, and name them correctly. i can find things on soulseek that i haven't seen since the demise of audiogalaxy.

the sheer diversity of out of print and hard to find albums made me yearn for something akin to the gutenberg text archive for music. if i could get grant money for this, i'd start such a project. there are some great artists whose music was released on vinyl only and will likely never again be reprinted. it would be a dream come true if i could build a database of this music and track down the people who made it. think what a wonderful thing it would be if it could be licensed for a massive interactive non-profit streaming radio station.

i'd eagerly pay a modest subscription fee for access to tens of millions of songs for on-demand streaming anytime anywhere. i wonder if a good subscription model could be developed that would pay for the equipment and the bandwidth as well as compensate the artists who originally wrote and recorded it? this of course would be an enormous under-taking and would require a lot of volunteer effort from people with huge vinyl collections of out of print, non-RIAA releases.

current indie artists could also have their music made available through this kind of service. based on the geographical location of a user requesting a stream of their music, info about local live performances by the artist could be streamed as an ad on the user's audio player. collaborative filtering could also add a lot to something like this. with the growing availability of wireless devices, on-demand streaming radio could conceivably be available anywhere. there would be no need to sit at a computer to listen to it. one could just log on with a wireless walkman, request a playlist, and start listening.

one of the big fears of the RIAA is on-demand music. it would kill the cash cow of their current marketing strategy which is to blanket radio stations with their focused-grouped pap until brainwashed teenagers stagger to the record store and buy the latest manufactured boy band crap. well... now the aforementioned teenagers probably just download it from the internet illegally. nevertheless, the RIAA are desperate to hold on to the power to decide when, where, and how people listen to music.

but there are millions of albums and songs out there that aren't under their control. a lot of it is *really* good and a lot of it is no longer commercially available. actually, probably most of it. since the emergence of recorded music, a mountain of non-RIAA vinyl languishes in attics or unsold in the dusty bins of record stores across the world. a lot of it is stored and lovingly cared for by obsessive record collectors who have painstakingly built their collections by trawling those very grounds. a lot of it is stored away on the record shelves of college radio stations.

if a kind of open source audio effort took hold, imagine the kind of library that could be built from that music. it would be a real travesty if all the unknown gems with less than a thousand pressings were lost. if they aren't made available to a larger audience they will be. vinyl that is carefully stored and protected can last decades, but even the best kept record has a limited life span. the entrance of the global communications network known as the internet poses the fascinating opportunity to preserve those recordings. it would make it a lot easier to organize avid music fans from every country in the world to digitize all that out of print music and make it available to everyone with access to the net.

the task of tracking down and obtaining permission from the artists or their heirs is probably the most daunting part of the scheme, but in my opinion, it would be the ethical thing to do. it would also be a interesting endeavor. i wonder what someone would think if a person came knocking at their door fifty years after he or she released 500 copies of the four songs his or her high school band recorded to ask permission to include it in a database of music to rival the RIAA.