Saved a quick blog post draft about the The Johnny Cash Project back in April of last year when I first learned of it. The collaborative project site describes it:

Working with a single image as a template, and using a custom drawing tool, you’ll create a unique and personal portrait of Johnny. Your work will then be combined with art from participants around the world, and integrated into a collective whole: a music video for “Ain’t No Grave”, rising from a sea of one-of-a-kind portraits.

Strictly Global just aired he the ever evolving video of “Ain’t No Grave” on regular old TV and it is high past time to blog it.

The video itself as of 9/30/10 starts around the 2:45 mark.

The record store — you know, those non-iTunes meatspaces where you can kind of touch and hold music — is rare and dying.  Except for Independent record shops.  These shops sell physical music formats to people other than top 40 lovers who have no computer.  In other words, they sell to music lovers.

Flavorwire did up “America’s 10 greatest Indie Record Stores.”  With links to their respected web presence, they are:

1. Other Music – New York, NY
2. Amoeba Records – Hollywood, San Francisco, and Berkeley, CA
3. Electric Fetus – Minneapolis, MN
4. Waterloo Records – Austin, TX
5. Criminal Records – Atlanta, GA
6. Princeton Record Exchange – Princeton, NJ
7. True Vine – Baltimore, MD
8. Reckless Records – Chicago, IL
9. Academy Records Annex – Brooklyn, NY
10. Shangri-La Records – Memphis, TN

Techcrunch recently posted a post about music sites called “Your Guide to Music on the Web — Part 1“.  Here are the sites it includes:

• Pandora
• Last.fm
• Deezer
• Finetune
• Amie Street
• Jamendo
• SoundCloud
• TheSixtyOne
• Project Playlist
• Jiwa.fm
• Jogli
• MixTube
• Lala
• Musicovery
• CitySounds.fm
• Jango
• RadioBeta
• TheRadio
• Aupeo
• Tun3r
• Play.fm

Some of the sites/services are very similar and some are naturally better than others, but all are worth briefly checking  if you admire tuneage.  Or you can read the TechCrunch article if you’d like a description/write up on each.

I signed up for and have just been invited to beta test the Free Music Archive. The Free Music Archive has launched into public beta.  Right off the bat I must say it is by far the best designed and most comprehensive source of podsafe music I’ve ever encountered.

Jason Sigal, who I only assume runs the FMA, has this to say about the site:

It’ll be a valuable resource for those in search of legal audio; each track will have a clear set of rights associated with it, as determined by the artist, letting podcasters, bloggers, remix artists and music fans know what uses the rights-holders will and will not allow. The project began here at WFMU, but we are just one of several curators who’ve been gathering audio for the Free Music Archive, freeing archival audio into the public domain, adding to the Creative Commons and building an open forum for participation that we’re very excited to share with you.

More screenshots and a little review after the jump:

Music is searchable and also divided into 12 main genres, further divided into various sub-genres.  Just hit the play button on the left to immediately hear any track you like or add any track to a pop-out player.  The pop-out player looks very nice, but I’d like to see some added functionality, namely the ability to reorder tracks.  Currently, when you choose to add a track to the player, it automatically starts playing that track instead of queuing it up to play next. This is OK if you were allowed to rearrange the order in which the tracks play, but I couldn’t figure out how to.

There are also opportunities to participate by posting to an on-site, personal blog and the ability to create and share mixes made from music on the FMA.

I remember reading on the pre-launch blog somewhere how many songs the FMA was going to start off with, but can’t remember the exact number.  However, its claiming to be one of the largest places, if not the largest place to procure free, safe and legal music for podcasts and the like.

Directed by free form radio station WFMU and funded with a grant from the New York State Music Fund, the Free Music Archive launched sometime on or around April 4th, according to the announcement on the pre-launch blog and a launch party scheduled for that day.

Found out about We are Hunted from the 37signal’s Signal vs. Noise Blog, who say, basically, the real draw here, the thing that sets We are Hunted apart from other similar music sites is its large album art.  But the S vs. N Blog doesn’t point out what the site actually does.  From the We are Hunted homepage:

We Are Hunted is the Online Music Chart. We aggregate social networks, forums, music blogs, Torrents, P2P Networks and Twitter to develop a daily chart of the 99 most popular songs online.

And Signal vs. Noise captions their screen shots to imply that We are Hunted is a music store.  While it looks like they do offer the option to buy the playable songs, it seems to me to be more of a Internet music chart.

Techcrunch has just reviewed thesixtyone.  I suggest you go there if you want details on the ins and outs of how thesixtyone operates, but basically the service is like a Digg for indie music on steroids.

A user gets so many heart points to heart up, or help make popular, songs they like.  You get so many hearts per day and gain hearts by inviting users and hearting a song early on before it becomes popular amongst other ways.

The music player stays open in the upper left hand corner while you jump around on the site.  Songs are embeddable.  Thesixtyone employs helpful pop-up notifications in the lower right that don’t annoy.

Overall the site should become a indie music mecca.

The term “content” — referring to material that constitutes a publication or document for an audience — is abhorrent. Applying the word “content” essentially cheapens the writing, music, video or whatever other form of media one is taking in and attempting to gain a life enriching experience from it.

The only purpose for casting a blanket term like “content” over every form of consumable media is convenience. It is simply easier to say we need more content on this or that site instead of actually taking the time to discuss what actually needs written or recorded.

Providing content. Content is king. Instead of focusing on gaining knowledge from whatever we are reading, watching or listening to, too many times the Internet community lumps these together and says “content” instead of engaging web communities in conversation by producing things that matter, things of lasting value.

Commodification of information is not at issue here. Many folks make a living off of good art and wanted words. It is simply the sweeping way this livelihood is often referred to.

My argument may come off as purely semantic with a high burden of proof and much chiding, but the point is to urge quality in everything we produce and consume online.

————-

(Updated 5/18/10)

But there’s really no one to blame.  Referring to it as “content” seemed to gradually come in to use and now you’re a weirdo if you don’t use the term.

But by referring to various media as “content” it all but jells one’s consumption of it away from style, substance and meaning and towards other intents for media like monetization.

When was the last time you referred to the music, films and written words you love so much — stuff that somehow helps define you and your beliefs — as “content”?

“There’s this awesome content I just consumed that has completely revolutionized my own life and is changing how people view the world.”

No.

For streaming music on demand, Rhapsody reigned supreme for a long time.  That time, I believe, is now over.  For one thing, Rhapsody has no downloadable client for Mac.  You must stream from their site.  But the biggest letdown is the cash money it costs.  Sure, it is a richer experience with artist bios and reviews and navigating from tune to tune, but why pay when you don’t have to.

Enter:

• Just Hear It
• GrooveShark
• SeeqPod
• Songza
• Last.fm
• Pandora
• Lala

I haven’t done extensive testing on any of the newer services, but the more established Last.fm and Pandora while not exactly set up like Rhapsody still offer free tunes.

Last.fm is geared more toward a social experience with the ability to play some music.

Pandora takes a different approach — more like a radio.  Choose an artist, song, album or genre and a custom station is created related to this choice.

It looks as if seeqpod and songza may scrape for music that already resides on various websites.  Just Hear It, GrooveShark and Lala implement a more polished interface for searching and playback.

I’ve been using Songbird for some time now. It’s basically an open source iTunes with Firefox built in.  Today they released version 1.0.  If you want to know more, check out their website or the TechCrunch post/review.  It is a fine piece of cross-platform software for music and audio lovers — particularly ones who like to procure free tunes from music blogs (because Songbird scrubs the page for audio and offers up mp3s for easy download).

Dr. Pepper promised everyone free Dr. Pepper if Guns and Roses released their album, Chinese Democracy, in 2008. G n’ R at long last delivered, but not Dr. Pepper, at least not for me.  I tried foolishly for too long yesterday to get some at http://drpepper.com/freedrpepper .  The offer lasts for 24 hours.  As I write this post, roughly five hours remain.  I’ve tried filling out the form in Firefox, Safari and Opera and it goes to a blank page, so I doubt anything will come of it.

Update: NME is reporting that because the Dr Pepper servers crashed, a G n’ R lawyer is criticising the company for not being prepared for the influx of traffic, calling for more time and full page newspaper ad apologies.