Music Gurus Scout Out Free Tunes By Katie Dean
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62982,00.html

02:00 AM Apr. 09, 2004 PT

After receiving e-mails from friends filled with lists of URLs pointing to songs on various websites, programmer Lucas Gonze thought there oughta be a way to listen to the tunes in one continuous stream.

An idea was born.

So Gonze built Webjay, a site where users can build their own playlists of free music -- like a mix tape -- and share them with other fans. The site doesn't host the songs, but it pulls together the URLs for each track and puts them in a playlist format.

Anyone can contribute. The site relies on the participation of music fans to find and vet cool tunes. People can stream a set list or download individual tracks.

"What we're finding on Webjay is, if you provide the tools to make it easy and you provide the community, then you find a ton of fantastic music that you've never heard of," said Gonze, who refers to the process of finding songs as a scavenger hunt across the Web. "There's way too much stuff for everyone to go through. But it's easy if one person finds one great song and shares it."

Webjay's collection spans musical genres from punk, blues and electronica to gospel and oldies from Eastern Europe.

"What you can't point to is hit songs," Gonze said. "There's no Eminem, there's no Britney."

The site does not support links to pirated or unauthorized music. Links to such songs will be taken down.

Gonze said about 100 people have contributed playlists to Webjay since the site went up in February. The operation is still small, but visitors to the site have nearly tripled in the last month, he said.

Webjay regular Brett Singer, a New York theater producer and computer consultant, builds playlists in his spare time. He's created more than 50 collections with titles like Song-a-Day, a list made up of songs he has chosen each day for the past two months. On March 28, he had a seaweed treatment, so he chose a song by the group Seaweed Soup. He picked a song called "Party Party" on the occasion of his kid's birthday party.

Some of the mixes have a political bent. Singer pulled together collections of remixes based on Howard Dean's now-infamous yell at the Iowa caucuses, and a playlist of songs with "testify" in the title, dedicated to Condi Rice. Songs on the "testify" list range from Christian gospel music to Rage Against the Machine.

"My break at work used to be mini golf (on the computer)," Singer said. "This has taken the place of that and it is infinitely more fun."

There's no set formula for finding music on the Web. Singer's strategy is to search AltaVista for MP3 links. He frequently adds pictures to his playlists using the Google image search tool. The pictures are accessible only if a person uses RealPlayer.

Singer has found free tracks that bands provide as a promotional tool, for instance. He has linked to tracks on MacJams.com, a community of musicians who use Apple Computer's GarageBand software. And the Live Music Archive on the Internet Archive website has also been a great resource.

Other good sources of MP3s are Epitonic.com and Internet music labels like Magnatune.

"You'll listen to a lot of stuff and all of a sudden you'll hear a gem," Gonze said.

Singer's most bizarre find was a set of MP3s that combine a reading of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles with techno beats.

Musician Dan Phillips was pleased to see his song, "Let it Snow," included in one of the playlists.

"It's flattering to see that someone else has found it and enjoyed it," Phillips said.

Webjay is a nice change from Clear Channel-dominated radio, he said. However, "it would be nice to have some link to the artist's site in some intuitive fashion," he said.

Singer said that the project has revived his interest in music.

"I was really surprised by how much free -- and not pirated free -- music there is out there," Singer said.

But free is no guarantee of quality.

"You have to be ruthless. There's so much bad stuff," Gonze said.

Originally posted by hellmutt
Stole from FW:

Apparently right now, Itunes is offering a free download song every Tuesday. Today's tune is My Hero by the Foo Fighters.