Via Lessig via Hebig and lastly via LegalTorrents where you can find 5 GB of electronica albums in MP3 set and ready for BitTorrent downloads. While I really do applaud the sentiment, it's unfortunate that these musicians still fall into the trap of the CD; do I really want to download 300 MB of bleepy game music before I can find out if I like it? Maybe I just don't understand BitTorrent, but all I have to go on is this one-paragraph review and links to whole-CD collections:

if you like super-bleepy '80s videogame music, you'll like 8BitPeoples, if you like melodic idm/electronic music, you'll like Monotonik and Kikapu, if you like indie and electronic, you'll appreciate Please Do Something, if you like dark ambient and slightly glitchier work, you'll like Enough Records.

I'm a big fan of Cage, Stockhausen and Varese, so 'electronica' maybe means a different thing to me, but I do still find many younger composers acknowledge and build on those earlier works. So I might actually like some of these artists --- only, is it worth the risk? Each download would devour 7% of my monthly bit-cap. I realize they have much deeper intentions and I only want to illustrate a point of the One-Track and not detract from the Legal Torrents; afterall, One-Track is distributionally agnostic, so there's nothing to stop me from drawing One-Track content from the Legal Torrents archives.

But to illustrate that point of revealing content to new listeners, basically, I'm not likely to take the chance on a whole-CD presentation like this unless I already know the artist ... and doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of a free promotional release?

To be heard above the RIAA noise, new music artists need a release engine that draws in listeners. Trouble is, you can't do that if you hit the audience with the massive entry fee of a solid wall of data; an archive like this is great and useful news for the fans who know what they are getting, but it may not be much use toward any goal of increasing the demand-side of the music equation ...The Glut vs The Flow

Sure, if I'm already in with the in-crowd, yes, I'd probably know that Enough Records has an evolving and unannotated list of their catalog, and I expect there are places where I can google those names and get to know the artists and hone my search thatway, but that's a lot of work, something only the fan might do, something that requires the drive to scale the mountain. Meanwhile, who knows, maybe I'd really like some of that stuff ...

The trouble is, and it's not limited to this Legal Torrent site or even CD or MP3 distribution sites, but in general too many new content archive sites make this same mistake: Too much information all at once becomes noise.

If we hit our audience with a tsumi of content, and then it's wonder they were washed away: Archives are wonderful for researchers, for people motivated to figure out yet another search syntax or wade through long long lists of barely-abstracts, but is it a good way to attract new attention? A much saner approach is to reveal content slowly, in a reliably repeated stream exposing what's in the collection, even if that is just picking from random from the archives for driving a page-one feature.

In a steady stream-of emerging One-Track frame of mind, same everything in terms of licenses and media, only instead of aiming to shoot me the entire catalog or even just their CD of Archives Volume 4 they should just shoot me what I can easily consume. You can hook attention far better with a periodic offer of just their best most latest track today, then shoot me another one tomorrow, another the next day and on and on, revealing the content bit by bit, pinging each across the blogosphere, incrementally, constantly, relentlessly ... this archive alone could provide techno electronica pings into the One-Track for months with room to give me a little background on each piece, why it was done, who did it, where they are going ...