An MP3 blog is a personal web site that offers daily or near-daily lists of MP3s that the site's author likes, sometimes with a bit of commentary, sometimes without. Often these blogs themselves host the songs. Some of these sites feature a fair amount of music I like and are pretty well written, and the best of them offer songs in good faith--to be listened to, not burned or distributed.

But with a couple of notable exceptions, MP3 blogs tend not to care whether songs are legally or illegally uploaded. And the fact remains that however much in good faith some of these bloggers post their songs, the fact that remains that once uploaded, a song becomes part of the internet and all too easily distributed illegally. I don't like this idea, so I'm going to steer clear from recommending MP3 blogs, as a rule.

That said, I will tell you about exceptions when I find them, starting below:



GOOD MP3 BLOGS FEATURING LEGAL MP3s:

Fat Planet
From Australia comes a wonderful resource for free and legal MP3s from around the world. Put together by an industrious gentleman named Stuart Buchanan, Fat Planet specializes in discovering music from more than just the usual places.

"Wednesday Morning Download" - Salon.com
Written by a writer and musician named Thomas Bartlett, this page features five MP3s every Wednesday morning, each accompanied by a thoughtful paragraph review. While Bartlett writes only about legal MP3s, he does feature both free and not-free songs. Be aware, too, that you have to subscribe to Salon.com to read the whole thing, or watch an online commercial to get a free "day pass" to the site each time you want to read this page. I also think five songs is more than you want to read about at once, but that's just me. All in all he does a nice job for a critic (don't get me started on music critics!)--he happens to be a musician as well, so that probably helps. He and I have overlapped a few times since he started the feature in March; his recent selection of Midlake's "Balloon Maker" acknowledged Fingertips, and sent a crazy amount of traffic in this direction, for which I am humbly appreciative.

Largehearted Boy
Self-described "music-loving guy living deep in the American South," Largehearted Boy is a literate, thoughtful, prolific fellow named David who runs a widely-read music-centric blog that features a whole heckuva lot more MP3 suggestions than Fingertips does. He's got what I think of as good taste--i.e. he and I like some of the same things, even as he skews towards the quirkier edges of indie rock. The MP3s he recommends are either legally available songs or live recordings--something I personally don't get involved with, but I see where he's coming from so I'll go ahead and recommend him anyway. Oddly enough he seems to run a blog called "Fingertips" as well, but it's about massage therapy.


updated 7 July 04





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