Mohtalim

The site archive.org has a rat ton of free music. I might harbor a desire to download some of it. But which ones to download? I get stuff from P2P or iTunes because I heard it on the radio, saw an ad or review, or got it from a friend. Assuming that my friends aren't getting stuff off archive.org, etree.org, or any of the other free music places, what do I do now? I don't know of any advertising or review apparatus for songs released on the internet. I never use the radio nowadays, much less Internet radio.

Who fills the role that the record companies used to in promoting new music in the new digital distribution model?

The basic idea is that you find other people who like one or more groups that you like, assume your tastes overlap, and then see what groups they like that you've never heard of.

Back in the early days of MP3s, many people ran anonymous FTP servers. There were search engines that would help you find a server with a group you liked. After you downloaded all the music you knew you wanted from the server, you could download some extra stuff you'd never heard of based on the assumption of overlapping taste. In those days, most people didn't have enough hard drive space to store anything they didn't like (Joe being the exception), so you could be fairly sure that anything on the server was something the owner liked.

As time went on, FTP servers became too vulnerable and were replaced by peer-to-peer programs, but the same idea held. If a person was sharing one group you liked, chances were good that you'd like other groups they were sharing. As hard drives got bigger and connections got faster, the mainstream bands got too widely distributed for this, but it still works well for less popular stuff. A variation of this is still possible with newsgroups and produces pretty good results.

Based on that experience, it seems to me that the best way to find must would be something like Amazon's recommendation system. Rate all the bands (or albums or whatever) you've heard, and use those ratings as a query into a database of everyone else's ratings. The bands most liked by people whose tastes otherwise match yours should float to the top.

Now, of course no such system exists outside of e-commerce (where the contents are restricted to those albums being sold), but it seems like a natural solution to the problem.

Indeed it does. So where the hell is the free music site with moderation?

Ah, there are two and they are both executables, not websites weirdly enough.

http://news.buzzsonic.com/index.php?p=356

http://www.indy.tv/
http://irate.sourceforge.net/

No wait, three.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomoradio