p2pnet - rss feed: The Google of indie music
p2pnet.net News:- Thanks to the Net, Indie music has come of age.
All musicians need is an online connection, a bit of initiative, a little imagination and they’re cooking.
The trouble is, there’s now so much out there, how do you get to hear to it all?
As we write this, we’re listening to Italy’s Cum Distortion —– thanks to Indy, Freenet creator Ian Clarke’s latest brainchild which, he promises, does for freely available independent music what Google does for the world wide web.
“Over the past few months, while working on Dijjer in public, we’ve been working on a sister project in private called ‘Indy’, and we’re now ready to release it to the public at-large,” he says.
It uses collaborative filtering, similar to that used by Amazon to recommend books, etc, to prospective buyers, to learn about your musical preferences in relation to other Indy users.
Everything it plays is from online indie music freely available on the web and you can rate each piece at between one and five stars. Using that as feedback, Indy will find and download music that’s keyed to what you like as opposed to what you don’t like : )
“Eventually it becomes like your own personal A&R machine,” says Clarke, going on:
“Artists benefit too, since the user can just click on the name of the mp3 and immediately visit their websites to learn more about them, or perhaps buy their CDs or other merchandise.”
Can you promote your own music through Indy?
Yep. Just go here.
What persuaded Clarke to develop Indy?
“We were concerned that even with all of the advancements with online media in the past few years, it was still pretty difficult just to find new independent music that you liked,” he told p2pnet.
“As a result, if you look at the type of music people were sharing on mp3 networks, or purchasing from a download site, it really wasn’t all that different to what was being promoted by the mainstream music industry.
“We wanted to use the Internet to democratise the promotion of music in the same way that the Internet is democratising the distribution of music.”
Clarke says he’s planning on extending Indy it to other types of media in the future, including video. And right now it’s for Windows only. But that, too, will change soon so it’ll also work with Linux and Mac systems.
The app is freely available as of today, although there’s a mechanism in place to limit the number of downloads to stop the Indy servers from being swamped.
Tip: If you have trouble hearing anything the first time around, just exit and re-start.
Download it here.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
<------Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin / John von Neumann------>
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See:-
Dijjer - ‘Just the beginning’, p2pnet, April 2, 2005
April 18th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
WOW IS THIS COOL!!!!!!!!!!!!
April 18th, 2005 at 11:44 pm
Not only is it cool, it may be part of the very thing to break the cartel’s monopolistic hold on music. They have had the music market sewed up for so long that no one has been able to break in from the outside to get either the listeners’ ear or to get a break into the biz.
Lately that is changing. Techno was one example of bands getting followings without the aid of music majors. Without aid of radio, promotion from the labels, nor special appearances by arranged labels that new sound got listeners. It was only after it became a scene that the majors wanted part of it. Today more and more bands are looking at the majors as if they carried some contagious disease and they do…
It is called “fatal greed” and they are eat up with it…
April 19th, 2005 at 4:28 am
Sounds great!! But it just doesn’t seem to work for me, and alas my technical skillz are lacking…maybe there’ll be an update soon
April 19th, 2005 at 9:58 am
You should email them and let them know, there is a feedback email address linked from their website
April 19th, 2005 at 2:39 pm
Sounds like Moodamp (www.moodamp.com).
- Higgy.
April 19th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
Really. Nothing better to do then in Poland?
April 19th, 2005 at 4:36 pm
Hmm, anyone else only get 4 songs out of the program, then it stops?