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The rise of the internet has opened up an endless spectrum of new opportunities for both lesser-known artists and bigger bands from around the world. Here are a few sites— for neophytes and experienced web-surfers alike—that are helpful sources for learning about, downloading, watching or otherwise consuming great music and music videos.
YOUTUBE www.youtube.com
YouTube single-handedly created the online video craze when it launched in 2005. The site still boasts more videos than all of its competitors combined—over 100 million videos are streaming there daily. It has a reputation for sillier videos with teenage pranks, bizarre chemistry experiments (Diet Coke and Mentos) and “dramatic chipmunks”, but over time YouTube has developed a surprisingly large cache of rare music videos, live concerts and documentaries from across the world. For instance, check out Jethro Tull and Fela Kuti (!) live in Munich in 1983, or the grip of videos featuring the Balkan gypsy band Taraf De Haïdouks. All videos on YouTube are free and anyone can upload to it. The only downside is that audio quality can be suspect, and some videos may contain text-overlay advertisements now that the site has begun to draw up licensing deals with content providers (like Universal, Sony and Warner) to avoid infringement lawsuits.
iTunes MUSIC STORE
www.apple.com/itunes
Although it’s geared mostly toward major label releases, iTunes does have a decent amount of new and reissued world music recordings. It’s also got a lot of bandwidth, which makes for very fast and sometimes deadly impulse buys like the Darjeeling Limited film soundtrack, which has everything from The Kinks to Asha Bhosle to Ustad Vilayat Khan. The toss-up is Apple’s AAC audio format. It truly can be a pain if you want to move your music to more than one computer or if you use a non-iPod mp3 player, and it has limitations on how often you can burn music to a CD.
MYSPACE www.myspace.com
MySpace has more or less eliminated the need for artists to build stand-alone websites. Just about every artist on the market, new and old, hip or square, living or dead (no joke) has a MySpace page. A typical page usually includes a few embeddable videos of live performances or a music video, and anywhere from one streaming track to an entire album. The problem is the actual website. It’s badly constructed and often overwhelmed by net traffic, not to mention that user profiles tend to have less-than-tasteful background images. Since you don’t need to be a part of MySpace to see public profiles, and an artist’s profile is usually on the first page of a Google search, you can check those tour dates and listen to some new music without joining the voyeuristic and badly-coded masses.
DAILYMOTION www.dailymotion.com/us
DailyMotion is one of the most-used video sharing sites in France. It hasn’t taken off yet in the U.S., so don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it. The site’s interface is a little more chaotic than Youtube’s, but it allows for higher audio and video quality. DailyMotion is available in over 17 different countries, and features some pretty interesting videos from all over the world. The artists tend to be from French-speaking countries, but the videos don’t have the obnoxious overlay advertisements like Youtube.
SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS
www.folkways.si.edu/index.html
This website is a portal into the Smithsonian Institute’s tremendous archive of music and resources. The site has dedicated educational tools including an extensive set of free audio and video podcasts, complete with lesson plans in PDF format. You can access and subscribe to the Smithsonian’s podcasts directly at the iTunes music store. Also make sure to check out the Smithsonian Global Sound (www.smithsonianglobalsound.org), which gives you ample access to the Smithsonian’s archives in the form of several (randomized) streaming radio stations. You can purchase music by the album or by the track through direct download, and for those who are worried about losing out on the “hard copy” musical experience, album liner notes are available before you even make a purchase. Be forewarned, though: the archives are exhaustively sorted by country, language, cultural group, language, and even by instrument! Surfing through the full contents of the SGS can turn into a time-consuming, albeit highly addictive, process.
MUSIC BLOGS
These short-form web diaries have touched just about every corner of the earth. There
are blogs about cooking, horror movies, political dissidents in China, and a virtually limitless library of both new and out-of-print music. A significant thread in the indie music blogosphere is devoted to a small group of NYC-based bands these blogs tend to link back to each other to increase their traffic (and ad revenues), but the beauty of the web is that there’s still plenty of room for blogs devoted to such arcane topics as vintage Turkish psychedelia (and more, at www.rarefrequency.com) and old-school soul (www.soul-sides.com). Perhaps the greatest— and potentially most controversial— thing about music blogs is that they tend to post mp3s for a limited time, with a disclaimer along the lines of “This is only here temporarily please support the artists and buy their records.” And they get away with it! For some great blogs out there with thorough coverage of the world music scene, check out Tofu Hut (tofuhut.blogspot.com), Sound Roots (soundroots.org) and occasionally, Brooklyn Vegan (brooklynvegan.com). For
a dose of some great African music that has largely languished in obscurity, try World Passport (ethnomusic.podomatic.com), and for general oddities from around the world, go to Excavated Shellac (excavatedshellac.wordpress.com).
CALABASH MUSIC http://calabashmusic.com
Calabash is a self-described “fair trade” music company, exclusively distributing the digital music of artists across the globe who are unsigned or on smaller labels. Artists get a 50% share of any sales and customers get the satisfaction of knowing that they’re not just giving their money to greedy labels. Calabash also works with Link TV (www.linktv.org), which is another great resource, on the National Geographic World Music site, which features videos on just about every genre of music you can think of. (Full disclosure: Global Rhythm also collaborates with the National Geographic site.)
LABELS
Record label websites are still an overlooked source of new music. The smaller ones have started to figure out that they can give away a song or two and still sell records. The folks at Luaka Bop have set up streaming online radio with different channels (labeled “African mix,” “Brazilian mix” and so on) from their catalog, and have a forum so fans can discuss their favorite artists and upcoming tours.
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