How and where to obtain good music? There’s a whole spectrum between “buying a CD from local shop” and “downloading the latest yet unreleased album from some random internet person”.

Price and quality varies, but the interesting thing is that those are not correlated in any way. You can find high quality music both for absolutely no price whatsoever or for normal price, both from enthusiasts and multi-billion corporations.

There are many places and ways to obtain music. I’ve listed some places which cater to my music tastes. Some links are to more general things such as directories. Spend a little time reading through and surfing, and you might find a whole new world of music opening to you.

Net Labels

These are sites run by enthusiasts which specialize in (legal) free music. For example, Kahvi Collective or Dusted Wax Kingdom.

Some places may sell a CD or DVD with their things, but more often than not everything is simply distributed over the Internet in formats such as MP3 or FLAC. The idea is: if you find something interesting, simply download it.

The problem with net labels is not where to find the net labels, but actually where to find the good ones. There is a nice directory at Netlabels.org. Try that for a start, sort by categories and head for the style of music you like.

It can take some time to find the good music, but when you do, I guarantee you will be very happy. If you’re tired of downloading the whole net label, note that often you can buy the entire back catalog from the net label for a small price. It’s usually in the range of 30-40 euros or so, and can include tens if not hundreds of albums. It depends on the net label.

Mixes, Podcasts, Radio Shows

One option is to rely on the taste and judgment of another person. Finding a good DJ is worth his weight (including his Technics SL1200 decks) in gold-pressed platinum. If you like the musical taste of the DJ, then basically anything from that DJ is often acceptable for you.

There are so many to choose from, really, that it’s hard to pinpoint any given place. But I shall try: have a go at Mix of the Week, Gilles Peterson Worldwide, Newmixes.com…

Again, it depends so much on what style of music you like. Newmixes.com is a nice directory-like site to start from.

Tools and Tips

1. Use a good RSS reader.

For podcasts, net labels, and other such things where the distribution happens through the Internet, you can often find an RSS feed which lists the latest stuff.

This will help you immensely as you can tell a special program to observe this feed and download whatever stuff is coming there. Then all you need to do is listen to the sweet sounds!

I can recommend at least two good RSS readers: Akregator (for Linux KDE users) and (cross-platform). There are many others, but after Akregator I found RSSOwl and have been happy ever since. Akregator couldn’t handle many thousands of articles without bloating like a balloon so I had to ditch it. It handles small number of feeds and articles all right.

Wikipedia provides a more extensive comparison of feed aggregators.

2. Use a good player.

For Linux KDE users there’s also a music player program called Amarok which can handle podcasts. Don’t be put off by some idiotic UI choices and overall dysfunctionality brought on by Amarok2 - e.g. can’t play audio CDs - it’s really a good player.

For Windows, WinAmp and Foobar2000 are good players.

What About Services Then?

Nowadays there are many sites, with a more or less commercial angle, which look like the Internet-equivalent of real world CD shops, for example: iTunes, Magnatune, etc. Some record labels also sell their releases on their web pages, for example Ninja Tune.

And there’s the few more services which I’d like to specifically highlight.

Spotify

There’s also , but I don’t personally like the idea of it. Why? Well, for one thing, it’s a streaming service. This means you don’t actually get the tracks - you have to have a network connection and you can’t just download the tracks to your portable music player. Also, you have to listen to advertising unless you pay a monthly fee.

So it’s kind of like customized radio in that sense. I’m not saying it’s bad, but it’s not something for me. If I want streamed stuff, I can listen to pre-selected good stuff without advertising for free, so I don’t see the point of either having advertising along or paying for the no advertising version.

Anyway, if you like this kind of service, there are alternatives too, for example Deezer.

EMusic

I have an emusic.com account, which costs me about 10 euro per month. Through the service I get to download 40 tracks monthly. The tracks are high-quality mp3 without any DRM. This means that I can burn the tracks off to DVDs for safekeeping, I can download them to my mp3 player, and so on. With a one-time cost I get freedom to do quite a lot with my purchase - I can choose where and when I play it, for instance.

So far I’ve been quite happy with EMusic. The bad thing is that they don’t have some good major bands, for example Pink Floyd, and sometimes you get a note saying “this album is unavailable in your country”. But those issues aside, it’s a wonderful resource.

Other Avenues

Copyright infringement aka. downloading off the net without permission to do so. Of course this is one option always, but depending on your ethical flexibility, it might not be something for you.

While not advocating any sort of illegal, immoral, unethical etc. behavior, I wish to point out the following: considering the income distribution within the music industry, contrary to what you hear, copyright infringement is not hurting the artists themselves so much. Instead, it is rather detrimental to the record companies and the value chain they control (cover art, CD factories, advertising, radio payola, studio hire, etc.). The artist is only a small piece in the chain.

Although most of the time the artist has to rely on the infrastructure provided by the record company to get their music out, it’s not primarily the artist which gets the shaft when someone downloads the latest album off Kazaa or whatever.

Also, take into account that when the record companies lose control over the distribution, they don’t like it at all. So this course of action has a non-zero probability of getting you into trouble with law enforcement. But, just so you know, that is one possibility and it’s up to you if you choose to either do it or don’t do it.