There is a new article about “The Future of Music” everyday. Every once in a while something is written on the topic that seems to indicate a bench mark in the discussion, something with a little perspective. A recent ReadWriteWeb article has some of these qualities. The article specifically deals with the online aspect of the future of music and what types of services we may see more of.

[Picture from a section of the article titled "Legal Battles With Record Labels"]

I was looking through some of the music that I have on my computer. I came across some strange genres that I wanted to list here. It looks like some of them only apply to a single artist. Number 6 is pretty good.

1. Dark-Hop
2. default
3. Electronica & Dance
4. Electronica/Dance
5. Gallery Rap
6. Music
7. Musik für Kinder
8. Not Your Average Hip Hop
9. Sexuality

Anybody else have any ones worthy of note?

A friend showed me this video a while back. It illustrates and provides a good example for something happening on a larger scale, something referred to as The Loudness War. And now a quote from the glorious wikipedia:

The phrase loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the music industry’s tendency to record, produce and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness each year to create a sound that stands out from others and the previous year.

The Free Sound Project functions as an online repository of sounds licensed under the curious and lesser known Creative Commons Sampling Plus! License. There is a good mixture of both straight field recordings and processed sounds. Under the terms of the sampling license, there are also multiple versions of many of the files which different members of The Project have tweaked and offered back up.

At the time of this post the site currently has 53557 audio files. That’s a lot. There are a couple of different ways to sift through all of that information: different searches for people on the look out (hear out?) for specific sounds and automatically generated lists like “Most popular files” and “Highest rated sounds” for general browsing.

I’ve always had this picture in my mind when it comes to places that have vast quantities of information and material like Free Sound. I envision most of the available good content lying dormant and collecting dust. Sure, new content is always featured in a ‘newly uploaded’ list. Sure, high ranking content is featured in a ‘high ranking’ list. What about the other stuff that hasn’t made those lists? Who has the time to go through every page of an archive of this size?

Fine, maybe all 53557 audio files of Free Sound do not need to be utilized at every minute of every day. Maybe the site serves its purpose and that’s it. More on that later.

At this point, I would like to draw attention to the “random sample” link on the lower left side of the main page of The Free Sound Project. This link is a nice feature and allows for a slight churn of content.

Project Idea: Click that “random sample” link and make something out of what you find. Beware, it may be some birds chirping, chant music, or someone’s grandfather snoring.

INQ is a website that features the releases of 28 (I counted) different netlabels. The site looks nice and doesn’t have the ‘crawler’ or ‘machine’ feel to it that a lot of “community” sites have. Each label featured on INQ has their own subpage, with a brief description of what they do and a 1 hour mix of their material. It seems that each label is required to submit a mix to be listed on INQ.

These mixes are a great way to get a general feel for what each label is doing and I’ve enjoyed listening through them and exploring. There are so many netlabels out there and there are probably even more that are not on a list. It’s a bit overwhelming.

I am less interested in the “news” aspect of the collective because it mirrors content being published elsewhere. The mixes, however, are a nice touch and they are a nice alternative to going to 28 different websites.