Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

It's time for the occasional obligatory music post. My musical tastes are probably less sophisticated than yours, so feel free to turn up your nose now. At least my tastes are eclectic.

I've noticed that way that I've been introduced to music has changed drastically in the last few years. With the omnipresence of the Internet and the fact that I'm rarely anywhere near a radio, my exposure to new music is not really that mainstream.

Looking at my 50 gigs of iTunes music, I notice about 80% CD-Ripped a long time ago, 10% downloaded (legally, dude!) from emusic.com a while back (I still haven't heard it all!), and 10% other (including iTunes purchases, new ripped CDs, etc.). Sorting it by "Date Added", I find it interesting where I've found music lately:

I got 2.6 Gigs of songs from the recent SXSW festival. And I slogged through it all, keeping 88 songs (0.4 Gig) that I actually liked. I've started to further explore some of the artists, such as Ulrich Schnauss (German synthesist), Bonnie Pink (Japanese Pop/Rock, sings in Japanese and English ... much cheaper to get through iTMS rather than CDs!), Apostle of Hustle, and so forth. A friend who was there got me into Missy Higgins, a woman with the strongest Australian accent I've ever heard in song.

It's also cool to have friends and neighbors who are musicians. Natasha Miller is one of Alameda's favorite torch singers; Paul Manousos lives a block away and someday I'll actually get to see him perform. And Jason "Fish" proctor, a talented Java and Pre-Mac-OS-X Mac programming former co-worker, is now the synthesist for The LoveMakers, now slightly available on iTMS as well. I know the folks of Hmmm and some of their stuff is cool, and some I'm not quite read for yet...

I pick up interesting CDs when I'm out an about. I got some tribal/chill kind of stuff from Jairamji, Ganga Giri, Angel Tears, and Robbie Robertson at the Green Festival last year.

Indy is a program on the Mac that helps you find independent music. I haven't used it much yet, but I did find Red Letter via Indy — they have a great new CD just out (that includes a song that is as happy-inducing as the 80's song "Walking on Sunshine").

Playlist Magazine has a nice Downloads page; it introduced me to the silliness of Coconut Monkeyrocket for example.

Let us not forget word of mouth, or word of Blog. Dori pointed me to local songstress Vienna Teng; I've since gotten lots of her music and seen her in concert. Nina Gordon appeared on the del.icio.us radar a few months ago.

I've been starting to browse around CDBaby. They have tons of music, and decent previews — but it's tedious to download and explore. I wish I wish the Aformentioned "Indy" program would hook up to CDBaby's database; that would really make it useful!

Anyhow, my point is that most of the music I'm finding these days it music not for the masses.

OK, that satisfies the craving to blog about music. For a while.