Since I haven’t been buying much music lately, what with my whole career change thing in full effect, I’ve been jonesing for some new tunes. I seem to have found my fix while exploring this whole podcasting phenomenon over the past few weeks and am actually finding some stuff to get excited about out there. Of course, I’ve long been a big fan of finding new music by listening to streaming broadcasts of traditional radio stations. Podcasts have a very different feel, though. They are finite programs that neccissarily focus on a specific theme, genre, or idea. Also, the RIAA considers podcasts of its artists’ works to be illeagal file sharing, so podcasters need to be careful about what they include in their feeds. This is an amazing boon for independent musicians, though. I’m getting turned on to tons of amazing new music that isn’t being played elsewhere by these simple podcasts made in people’s living rooms. Here are a few that I’ve been listening to of late:
- Indiefeed features several feeds for different genres of music. These are nice bite-size downloads with brief introductory and closing comments bracketing one track by an indie artist. The hip-hop and americana feeds are particularly choice.
- Julien Smith’s In Over Your Head Radio is based in Montreal and tends to play hip-hop and atmospheric electro stuff. The whole show has a nice feel to it and he tends to stick to a reasonable sub 30 minutes length without too much babbling.
- NYC’s Wooster Collective has an interesting feed that includes audio relating to art-happenings. The most recent podcast followed a guerrila street-art installation by Darius Jones.
- A number of traditional broadcasters have begun converting select programs to podcasts. Santa Monica’s KCRW is among these. Of course, their famous music programming is not included due to the aforementioned RIAA rules. Harry Shearer’s (Simpsons, Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman) satirical Le Show is included, though.
Much of what is out there has the feel of free-form college radio, a disappearing format that once could be found originating from nearly every small campus in the country. I’m not about to resurrect my old WRFW broadcasts, but the idea has crossed my mind…
