I was in college during the mp3 digital revolution, it is has made me the digital equivalent of a crusty old curmudgeon of sorts. For example, I don’t like Digital Rights Management (DRM), or DRM-friendly players, and I don’t play friendly with stores trying tell me what to do with the music I’ve purchased. This wasn’t the way it "used to be way back when" and I refuse to change. I’ve stuck to my guns and have supported players that support open, license free codecs like ogg-vorbis. What does this mean in the long run?
Probably nothing, as there are plenty of people willing to go down the locked down, producer controlled route to get their tunes. Music inspires something rebellious and anti-establishment in me at times, and I’d rather be principled and stubborn than carrying around an iPod where I don’t even "own" the music on my machine.
One of the ways to discover music is through music stores and browsing their selection. People at last.fm have a good idea. Learning about music can be a viral sort of experience. A friend recommends a song, which gets you interested in a new genre, which changes your tastes, which leads to new discoveries, etc.
Another way to find music is through music blogs. I had heard about various blogs posting music for sample, profit, or possibly exposure, but I had no way of easily finding, linking, organizing, and keeping a coherent view of the scene. Enter Songbird. Think of iTunes but with a choice to visit any site you want. Instead of being locked into what Apple wants to sell you at the behest of the record industry that they represent, roll your own service. Visit any mp3 blog. Have any of the music available displayed. Play it as you would locally. Download it for free. Transfer and sync it to your device. Create a playlist with songs on the web. Browse and find new mp3 blogs and new music. It all works wonderfully well.
I spend the afternoon doing something new. I was easily discovering music I liked that I had never heard before and downloading music that the bands want me to hear for free. These aren’t main stream bands, but the underground new artists that need to get their name out and use the web as a digital distribution center. Best of all, it works with your existing library and brings you up to speed with little hassle. The screencast shows you all you need to know to get started finding and subscribing to new music quickly.
The program is only a beta release candidate now, but with some time, some polish, and some open source ingenuity, it might be the "NEXT BIG THING". If the ability to save and store videos from viral sites like Youtube or Google Videos as easily as finding and downloading music was included, this would be my media surfing program of choice. It’s still got a few bugs about discovering and finding music on a page, but it’s very impressive and has let me find the music I want to listen to very quickly and easily.
It might not be for everyone, because the majority of people, but it works for me.
