No, I haven't turned into a spambot.

The band 50 Foot Wave, basically the new, harder Throwing Muses has released their new EP, Free Music straight to the internet under the Creative Commons license.

Of course, there's nothing particularly new about bands releasing music for free, but 50 Foot Wave has already released two commercial CDs over the last year or so, and the driving force behind 50 Foot Wave and Throwing Muses, Kristin Hersh, has been recording music commercially for 19 years now.

I don't know that everyone will like it. It's pretty punk-oriented (and by "punk" I don't mean the pop stuff you hear on the radio these days). But it's neat seeing an established artist release music this way. I get the feeling that she probably wouldn't have seen a lot of money for the CD anyway and would be making it all on tour, so this isn't losing her any money, I bet.

Anyway, in addition to all of that, it's been released not only as low- and high-bitrate mp3s, but oggs and flacs, too. There's even hi-res cover art, lyric sheets, etc. And one of the initial distribution points is via BitTorrent. (If only the tags were complete; there's only a copyright tag.) Go get it!

Thanks Bitt, I'm going to give them a listen. Merry New Year!

-Zeke

Edit: Which tags were missing? The .mp3 files had all ID3v2 tags (but no 1.1 tags) complete.

I downloaded the VBR files from archive.org. Maybe they're differently tagged?

Thanks! I didn't know the band's background. I love some of the older Throwing Muses and Belly releases, but never knew this band was even connected.

It's kind of like Pretty & Twisted but actually good (I liked Concrete Blonde, but couldn't stand P&T).

I d/l'd the mp3's from the links on the page individually. Strange huh?

-Zeke