Month: August 2005

GEMM

GEMMGEMM is an online music store I came across somehow. They specialize in rare music, or at the very least they boast that they can get it for you. I’m assuming they just have a list of sources they can scan with a search, which looks pretty thorough. Destroyer’s Thief was going for $75 the other day on vinyl. Sheesh. But I haven’t seen it anywhere else. Makes me wonder how valuable my vinyl City of Daughters is. Eight bucks at Reckless Records. Still to find: vinyl copies of Streethawk, Reveille, and Finally We Are No One.

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75 Minutes

75 MinutesSome folks from indietorrents have started a 75-minute, Sundaily podcast called 75 Minutes. Having spent a lot of time lately on the elitist, invite-only torrent community, I can tell you these people know their shit. The show is DJed by two live humans who introduce and outroduce each set with plenty of information about the showcased bands, and aggressively invite listener feedback. If you want to hear a broad and informed overview of what’s happening in indie music this week, listen to this show.

The show is offered in both mp3 and aac formats, the latter of which now supports chapter divisions, album art, and hyperlinks with iTunes 4.9.

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The New last.fm

Audioscrobbler has now been subsumed by its cousin last.fm. Aside from the bold new colors, there are a lot of additional features that are really easy to get sucked into. Each user is provided a blog, whose posts appear on that user’s profile page and can contain links to artists, albums, or tracks that are relevant to the post. Arists, albums, and tracks can all be tagged with keywords such as “noise” or “indie pop,” and these tags can then be tuned into using the last.fm player. The player has seen a redesign too; rather than being controlled with a web interface and streamed as an .m3u, a stand-alone program is required. This isn’t going over well, but I much prefer it; it’s cleaner, less buggy, and contains a few nice features such as a channel history to see what you’ve listened to previously. And maybe most importantly, charts are updating almost daily now.

There are many other small improvements that I’m not mentioning, but basically I think the whole site is just way, way better. The new interface takes some getting used to, and there are some obvious improvements that could be made and that I’m sure will. If you haven’t signed up yet, you should. I’m looking forward to their further integration with MusicBrainz.

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