Online music (and other audio)

• Sugar in the Gourd (http://sugarinthegourd.com/) is John Salmon’s old-time music webcast site, with links to buy the albums.
• Deutsche Grammophon have a new (DRM-free) MP3 store at http://www.dgwebshop.com/. (new)
• RadioLovers.com has old-time radio shows for free in MP3 format — stuff like Flash Gordon, Gunsmoke, Benny Goodman, and so forth. US copyright law prior to 1973 seems to mean that this stuff is in the public domain. Lots of stuff that’s interesting, culturally important, and worth listening to, but that would probably not have enough commercial value decades after its production to be on the market if it were still under copyright. (Nowadays, anything newly produced is automatically copyrighted, and copyright lasts about a hundred years. Think what that means for your great-grandchildren’s access to the stuff you’re listening to now.)
• Smithsonian Global Sound sell 99¢ downloadable audio tracks of (mostly) folk music, and are reputed to do a much better job of sharing the profits with the performers than most commercial distributors do.
• Magnatune is an online commercial record label that lets you try before you buy, and whose artists retain the rights to their music (licensed under the Creative Commons license). Their slogan is “We are not evil.” Here’s the Slashdot thread I heard about Magnatune from. The guy who runs it posted a fair bit to the thread.
• Russian Blues is where Yuri Naumov sells his CDs — just what you’d expect grom the name. Each album has a free track available in MP3 format.
• BeSonic offers free (as in beer) music (and lets bands upload their own music for distribution).
• BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time program about the history of ideas is available in RealAudio, downloadable MP3, and podcast, and they have an archive available.
• monotonik provides electronica in MP3 format via BitTorrent.
• Loca Records (http://www.locarecords.com/) ‘is a small independent record label based in Brighton committed to releasing electronica and post-rock.’ They provide copylefted (freely downloadable and sharable) music by small groups, and you can also buy the albums in physical format.
• On November 11, 2002, there was an interesting Slashdot thread on alternatives to RIAA-mediated music.
• CD Baby (http://www.cdbaby.com/) sells CDs by independent artists. They work directly with the artists, who make a hefty percentage of each sale. Of course, if you want to help the RIAA screw over the artists, undermine the political process, and eliminate individual access to general-purpose computers, you could buy music from one of their labels instead. :-)
• Audble.com have downloadable audiobooks (for pay). (I haven’t used their service yet.)
• Emusic (http://www.emusic.com/) is a commercial subscription service; you pay a reasonable monthly fee and you can download anything in their substantial catalogue. They had great stuff, but they significantly changed their service (with no notice) in May 2003, requiring their customers to run Intel-only binaries to use their service, pissing off a lot of their customers, including me. I no longer recommend them.
• This Slashdot thread discusses sources of digital audiobooks.

Online music radio stations

• SomaFM (http://somafm.com/) and in particular their Groove Salad section were recommended to me by my friend Christine. (new)
• WCPE.org is an independent noncommercial classical radio station from the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. According to their web site, they are completely listener-funded, unlike NPR stations which I think tend to be around 50% listener funded these days. They stream in many formats, including Ogg Vorbis and MP3.
• KCRW in Santa Monica netcasts ‘alternative’ music and NPR news in MP3 (Shoutcast), RealPlayer, and Windows Monopoly Player format. In addition to the simulcast stuff, some of their programming is archived (just in RealAudio as far as I can tell).
• Radio Paradise describe themselves as “eclectic online rock radio”. You can see what they’re like by looking at their playlist for the last six hours.