Pretty Girls Make Graves
And pretty good music
apparently
This is why I love bittorrent.
I've been surfing around Suprnova.org (leave out the e for.. umm... extraneous lawsuits?) looking for some new music for a few days, and not only have I been finding lots of bands that I've always meant to listen to, but I've been finding complete albums and discographies.
Getting the whole album - not just popular songs, or mislabeled mp3's or bad live recordings - is freaking awesome. This was the reason that I converted my CD collection to MP3 back in '96. I wanted an easy way to play the music that I liked, and had already paid for. Because most of my collection is legit, I've got everything organized by Artists and then full albums, so having random downloaded singles in there is a pain.
We saw Pretty Girls Make Graves open for The Atari's a while back and I found myself liking them but hadn't gotten a chance to listen to their stuff. Listening to it now, I can say that I like the whole album, and I'll both look for more PGMG shows now and will probably buy CD's and merch there to support them.
I thought Napster and other programs were neat, but because my collection is generally of complete albums I already owned, I really never used them to download gobs of music.
The "bandwidth is free" culture of Bittorrent where people are encouraged to make complete collections and link them all together as a torrent has finally peaked my interest as a downloader, and I feel does a lot more for the artists involved because it gets people to listen to their whole body of work and become fans, rather than just grabbing the single and forgetting who sings it.
The "no central server" principals of Bittorrent should also keep it going against the efforts of the RIAA, so long as sites like suprnova don't become too central. There's also an implied safety to downloading with BitTorrent - It's not encrypted or secret, you can still be sued, but with BT, you're going in and making surgical downloading strikes. You get what you want, share it back while you're downloading it and a little bit after, and then get out.
BT is also the first filesharing system to really have a case as a legitimate file sharing tool - I've used it to download the last few versions of Knoppix and Fedora Core, and it's just flown along. Keep your eyes on it, I feel like things are about to get really interesting.
