Genres in particular are very fluid. Even though we have hundreds of genres and sub-genres, it is not uncommon for there to be ambiguities and mixes of several types of genres. It took me a while to discover the difference between trance and house music, and even today it puzzles me. A lot of the blame is due to mislabelling or generalizing of artists and albums but that is another topic.

Musical preferences is also very different between people who like even the same genre of music, because the genre itself has changed and evolved. If you listen to early dubstep (Girl from Codeine City by L-Wiz) and more recent dubstep (Game Time by Zomboy) tracks, they are two different sounds. Though, I’m fairly sure each classifies as their own sub-genre by now.

When you try to mix these two algorithmically, the results do not hold great promise. At least, in my case. If you ever listen to tsubaki, his sound is pretty unique. Beatbot will return some reggae (getting warmer), hip hop (colder), and dubstep (colder). Nothing of which sounds comparable.

Recently though, I found tsubaki on soundcloud. More importantly, soundcloud lets you see what other artists that artist is following. And I now found another artist that makes similar music – dubsalon. So here we have the artist recommending (or at least, listening) to another artist.

This is something that I think we should take advantage of, if not already (which I think we do not). This information is a bit more difficult to harvest, but might be more useful.

This was not easy.

I really do wish to support artists, I really do. I purchased a ton of CDs (400+ songs, and yeah it cost me >$400) because I can’t always go to their concerts. I want to avoid having to illegally acquire this stuff. But it feels that I can only do it on their terms, for crappy technical boner-inducing-big-brother reasons, and I have to sacrifice my requirements.

What are my requirements? High bitrate MP3/WAV/FLAC. No DRM. I vote with my wallet a lot, and this is something I can get behind.

Really, I want to pay you. I was even willing to pay trackitdown.net a premiuum of $2.50USD for a WAV (for something I probably can’t hear the difference between). Oh, until I found this little gem :

All of the tracks downloaded through our website are ‘watermarked’ with a special form of copy protection that uniquely identifies the owner of each track.

– trackitdown.net HowTo (How to suck apparently)

I know I’m a little bit of a niche. Forgive me for going against the status quo and not buying on iTunes and wanting it under a free (as in speech) lossless codec. But honestly, anyone who wants your music for free gets it for free. I’m going out of my way to try to pay you and be fair to both of us about it.

Luckily, I have found BeatPort, which almost fits my needs. I dislike their flash-only website, having manually to convert wav to flac and fill in metadata, and the unfortunate restricted tracks for some songs. But they seem to be the most fair – to me at least.