In The Realm Of The Free

Where is my tour guide?

I had previously mentioned that there were 6 GB of free music from the South by Southwest available as bit torrents.

That's around 60 hours of free music! Well over 1000 songs, one song per artist.

How do you even know what to listen to in that mass of musical notes?

You need a tour guide.

How do you find the tour guide?

NPR's Sound Opinions has some of that covered in this podcast.

But really, in the morass of free everything, when the lowest common denominator is free, then all normal distribution channels, which in some part are conveyors of worth, the music worth listening to, the movies worth watching, the books worth reading, are completely destroyed.

What then to rely upon? the internet? blog posts, podcasts, forums, tweets?

A community of people who may or may not have worthwhile opinions.

Are we back to the village square, carved out of the digital milieu?

So much noise for so little signal.

Whither the kingmaker?