With the fall of mp3.com, so have many recordings by bands that are irreplaceable, to never be heard again. After the announcement of the end of mp3.com I rushed to archive as much of the music I liked from the site as possible, and began my archive of freely available tunes.
What I hope to inspire in you is to begin your own music archive, that way rare recordings and the traces of music that just plain never made it will not die. You can do this through many cheap and easy ways, such as visiting online music sites, going to local concerts, and visiting you local record shops. Hopefully you too will soon have an archive of music to call your own.
After the fall of mp3.com many similar sites have surfaced, the most dominant being purevolume.com, garageband.com and myspace.com. There are also many others that have comparable databases of free and legal music at your disposal such as hxcmp3.com, centerfuse.net and pahardcore.com. The songs available for download on this site are free and legal to share with your friends, and if you ever instant messaged anyone a song on campus you know it’s pretty darn fast.
There are also many great sites called zines who review the latest releases in a particular genre and usually give links to freely available songs from these releases. Emotionalpunk.com, Metaleagle.com, theprp.com, punktastic.com and loudside.com are all great zines that I frequent for punk/rock/metal music. I have quite a nice archive made from sites like this which are free to look through.
The local music scene here in Bowling Green is filled with many talented bands; such as the Modern Soviet Enemies, A Beautiful Smile, Blood Dumpster, The Fury, The Drama Club, Red Headed Stem Cell and Sledge. Each will sell you their CDs for cheap or even give you a free copy if you talk to them at one of their shows.
The main places to see concerts in town are Howards Club H and Nate and Wally’s, which have a show most days of the week. The Frequency, which features former members of the band Trans-Am, will be playing Howards next month on Oct. 6 with local favorite Stylex. Shows like this aren’t rare — last year Howards had such bands such as Matchbook Romance, Fall Out Boy, Chimera, Shadows Fall and The Lawrence Arms play. There is also a large archive of shows here on campus put on by organizations like UAO, CRU, Resident Halls and many other campus groups.
A great example of this is Quadstock, put on by the quads Kreischer and Harshman last year. This show was headlined by Marcy Playground and also featured such great acts as Trephination (name soon to change), Jeremiah Jacks, Woodville and yours truly. To hear about events and shows on campus, visit events.bgsu.edu and look at the campus schedule. I recommend visiting these venues and getting to know as many of the bands in the BG scene as possible, because they will aid you plenty in building your musical archive.
There are two main record shops here in BG — Madhatters and Finders. I definitely would recommend making use of both of their used CD inventories. Finders’ bargain area, located in the back of the store, is a great place to find many CD’s for one or two bucks. I’ve been able to buy albums by such bands as Staring Back, Revis and Lost Prophets from the bin. Madhatter’s used CD inventory is also very complete and affordable, but the true gem of the store is the large amount of old vinyl and cassette tapes that you can buy for as low as 25 cents each. While this is not quite like getting free music from purevolume.com or a local band, you can find a lot of rare stuff in this manner, even occasionally something recent for cheap.
Now you know how to build your musical archive — what do you do with it? You listen and enjoy, and for the music that is legally free, share it with your friends. You can also become a DJ at the local college radio stations and play any of your special finds. The stations are WBGU and WFAL, and fall training should begin soon. So remember to visit online music sites, check out the local music scene and local shops to build your personal music archive.
