Free downloads abound on the Internet. But how does one find the good and skip the bad?

Today Pitchfork announced its Infinite Mixtape, a series of free MP3 downloads. The first series, 21 tracks in all, are songs that are the staff's favorites of 2006. Pitchfork has long offered MP3 links, but not in this format. Now there's more weight behind each offering because Pitchfork's stamp of approval is valuable.

Another online tastemaker, eMusic, offers a free daily download. Today's freebie is "The Sediment" by The Palaxy Tracks. Only one track is posted at a time (better visit every day) and a thorough biography explains the song, the album from which it's taken and the band.

As the number of music blogs explodes, it becomes harder and harder to keep up with the offerings. New blogs enter the blogosphere just as MP3 blog readers seem to be tightening up their list of daily visits. There's a lot of discovering to do, but who has the time?

When the volume of blogs rises to an unmanageable number, sites like elbo.ws come in handy to show which are the most popular tracks on MP3 blogs. It's a good shortcut to endless surfing and downloading. At the same time there's a need for trusted, familiar voices to be a source for free music, too. Pitchfork and eMusic are filling that need

Posted by Glenn at 7:38 PM | Link
|Downloads||Pitchfork||eMusic|

• What the world needs now is another Pitchfork article... Actually, this one is pretty good. It delves into the weight behind the site's words. Pitchfork honcho Ryan Schreiber comes off well. This quote/complaint, though, doesn't jibe with the site's name-dropping album reviews: "More and more, criticism is not about criticism; it's about making comparisons." (City Pages, via Hypebot)

• Hype...it can either lift a band or spoil its dreams. This Guardian article on the science behind hype starts by mentioning that Q Magazine recently invented a fake band, build hype via MySpace and got the one and only Alan McGee to offer a gig at his Death Disco club night. (The Guardian)

• It's an ironic MP3 blog's dream come true: Teddy Geiger covering The Postal Service's "Brand New Colony." (Download, via Stereogum)

Posted by Glenn at 8:50 PM | Link
|Pitchfork|

As if the no-longer-free Stax music sampler at eMusic wasn't enough, the online music store is offering to subscribers a free, 24-track sampler of bands that will perform at the Pitchfork Music Festival later this month. The track listing reads like a who's who of indie faves: Art Brut, The National, Spoon, Mission of Burma, The Futureheads, Jens Lekman, Aesop Rock, Mr Lif, Tapes 'N Tapes, Destroyer and others.

Among the 24 tracks are two songs tagged as "eMusic only." One is Yo La Tengo's "Beanbag Chair," which is currently available for free at the Matador website (download MP3 here). The other is The Mountain Goats' "Woke Up New" from their album Get Lonely, out August 22nd on 4AD.

eMusic currently offers other free or mostly-free samplers from Mirsa Records, Surfdog Records and Upper Class Recordings.

Posted by Glenn at 11:45 AM | Link
|Digital Music||Online Stores/Services||Pitchfork||eMusic|

Much was been written on Pitchfork, but the article by the Washington Post's J. Freedom DuLac about the hugely influential music site, "Giving Indie Acts A Plug, or Pulling It," is the best Coolfer has read. What DuLac has done is capture the business and cultural impact of Pitchfork and add the personality of founder and editor-in-chief Ryan Schreiber.

DuLac spent time with Schreiber at this year's SXSW to witness a day in the life of the country's leading indie music trendsetter. To his interview DuLac intersperses stories of people touched by Pitchfork's hand: Merge Records, which benefitted from a near-perfect review of an album by The Arcade Fire; a product manager for Chicago's Reckless Records, who tracks the sites reviews to help manage inventory; and artists who taken hits to their careers after ruthless Pitchfork reviews. That review was for a solo album by Travis Morrison of the Dismemberment Plan.

"The album was branded with a dreaded 0.0 rating (Liz Phair and Sonic Youth are among the other artists who've suffered that indignity), and Morrison's bandwagon quickly emptied: College radio programmers cooled to his new project, a record store in Texas initially refused to stock the CD, and fans suddenly decided they probably shouldn't like Morrison anymore, either."

Think back to the guest-blogged Coolfer post about Pitchfork and its sometimes negative influence, "Stick a Fork In It." This industry insider decried Pitchfork's ability to harm a budding band's career. Most people queried felt it was better to get no review if was mediocre or worse.

Such is the potential danger of a powerful voice like Pitchfork -- and really no other single magazine or website to challenge it. Even when Pitchfork does good like when it helped jumpstart the career of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah it can do some bad. DuLac writes of being unable to get inside a club because of the mass of people waiting to see Clap Your Hands. Schreiber is "agitated" by the long line and tells DuLac the band got "too much too soon." Of course, Schreiber helped create that long line and gave the band too much too soon.

Posted by Glenn at 1:13 PM | Link
|Indies||Internet||Pitchfork|