On the playlist worth a mention right now I have Svalastog's album Woodwork. A fantastic selection of ambient 'experimental' tracks. Many thanks to Tim for letting me rip his CD, or not, I'm pretty sure I asked...



Also a current firm favorite is 20 Minute Loop. That link will take you to their band page/profile on bandcamp.mu, an absolutely fantastic service for groups and artists to self=promote and sell their music. The groups on there are mostly indie (independent: subculture music that is independent of major producers) or underground, and there is a wide range of genres to suit any taste.

The website is absolutely fantastic; purely from a web design point of view. The interface is really clean and a lot of the functionality is very well thought out and implemented. There are a lot of really smart features which, although I won't be 'borrowing with pride', should inspire me in taking my work to the next level, of both design and functionality. I am also very keen on discovering lesser-known music, or music I perceive to be more obscure, partly for the impression of getting away from the crowd, but mostly because I enjoy the process of finding and enjoying new music discovered in serendipitous ways.

One particularly appealing aspect of bandcamp is that people, both producers of and sellers of music, are experimenting with new platforms for the distribution of music. A lot of the tracks on bandcamp are free, some are 'name your price' (i.e. you pay what you want, even nothing, often with a suggested or minimum price) and some are the more traditional fixed price. The tracks are available in a plethora of formats so whatever your desire, platform or device you can get the music exactly as you would want it, meaning you can get to the important part; enjoying the music, as easily as possible. There is also none of that nasty DRM.

And all of this makes me happy, as I am very passionate in my beliefs that the traditional methods of music distribution are outdated and no longer relevant to our digital networked society. I'd go as far as to say that everyone is getting a bum deal; fans (customers) can't get the music how they want it when they want it, groups can't get the music to their fans, and the traditional labels are suing and complaining while stuck in the middle of a transaction they no longer understand or control, making things as hard as possible while ruining the enjoyment for both the fans and the artists. There are great opportunities for the new services which are appearing, and they truly have the chance to be, although I dislike the term, game-changers. It's an exciting time, and I very strongly believe that bandcamp has got it right.

Ultimately I welcome anything that brings the high quality and (largely) unknown group of independent music creators more easily available to more people.

Edit:
As a side-note I want to say a little more about the 'name your price' format. I think this is fantastic, and is being trialled by a number of larger groups, including Radiohead. It appeals to me strongly as my method of enjoying new music is in a 'sample and reward' format. I often find an artist which I think I may be interested in, and then download their music for free, from Bit Torrent usually. If I enjoy what I hear then I feel that the artists hard work and talent should be rewarded, so I will either buy the music, preferably from iTunes, or the group's website, though ideally I will 'donate' some money to them. Although this isn't strictly legal, I wouldn't have bought the groups music legally without hearing it more anyway.*

A lot of groups have this ability on their website as they realise that people do download their tracks for free, but as opposed to being heartless beings with an insatiable thirst for free shit, these consumers of music do care about the bands they listen to, and are fans, and understandably will give the groups money, voluntarily, for what they perceive to be good music.

This is why the 'name your price' format works so well, the people that pay nothing wouldn't have paid for the music anyway, and who knows, they might enjoy it and come back to give the artists something later on. The fans will pay, often as much as if they had bought the physical media, which means more money for the group than had the sale actually been of a CD (construction+distribution costs). And people like me can sample the music and reward the groups whose music they enjoy. There is no need for DRM if you are giving it away for free (if the person doesn't want to pay anything) meaning you aren't turning off your paying consumers through fiddly and inconvenient protections. And you no longer have piracy, as you are giving the music away. You can also accurately follow how many people are enjoying your music for free. Music charts, if that is what you are interested in, become more valid again as you can track downloads, whether paid or otherwise, as opposed to the music being downloaded for free invisibly.

May the 'name your price' format become a widespread phenomenon!

*It is an interesting argument to examine whether if a law is in place which a large portion of society is violating regularly and deliberately because they feel it is 'wrong' then which needs to change? The behavior of the society, or the law? Especially when the environment the law was first written in has changed as drastically as the industry of production of culture with the rise of the digital networked society. But that is a whole other topic.