Websites that Review Free MP3s?

IWantMyMP3 asks: "I used to read The New Musical Express to know about new good music. But NME seems to ignore all related to MP3. And there is a lot of free (gratis) music at MP3.com, Vitaminic.com and so on. I'm looking for a website (perhaps a Slash-based one) where to read previews about all this free stuff in MP3. Then perhaps I'll be able to say goodbye to those stupid summer songs that are played over and over again on the radio stations, tapping on my head." It would be nice if folks actually started paying attention to the lesser known artists out there who actually release on MP3. Such a site would be a good first step if it doesn't exist already. Any ideas?

www.epitonic.com

[Pauly]

I personally like epitonic [epitonic.com].

It's something akin to an online CMJ, but unlike CMJ, it's free.Furthermore unlike CMJ, the music they pimp doesn't SUCK TREMENDOUS ASS!

http://www.nezzwerk.com/seven

[sevenseven]

"seven" e-zine ( http://www.nezzwerk.com/seven [nezzwerk.com] ) is trying to do that for the artists that appear on mp3.com in the genres of dark electro/industrial/noise. for now "seven" reviewed just a few due to the time/amount of information considerations, but more to come in future.

Rolling Stone

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Does some reviewing of the mp3s on their site. You can review them yourself as well. They also send out optional free emails notifying you of well reviewed new songs.

Some mp3 related BB are a good starting place.

[Finkle McGee]

I've run across a few mp3 related BB where users post regular reviews of non-signed mp3 bands. A few off the top of my bookmarks are Musika [wmp3.fm] (almost everyday) This BB at mp3.com [mp3.com] (often) Artist Area at Listensmart.com [listensmart.com] (sometimes) That's a start for your quest anyway. Finkle.

Riffage.com

[Mike Miller]

Riffage.com [riffage.com] has mp3s and does implement a kind of scoring/sharing mechanism that attempts to suggest music based on what people who have rated things similarly to you in the past. I wasn't too keen on it earlier since it didn't seem too accurate at the time, but it might have gotten better with more artists and users.

- Mike

Here's one

[owillis]

Try RadioSpy [radiospy.com], along with a cool application, they have MP3 News and reviews of unknowns.
--
Chaosnetwork [chaosn.com]

use statistics to predict a good song

[Anonymous Coward]

There are such a large number of mp3s out there (very good and very bad) that it is bound to be hard to review a significant portion of them. Even if a website does start doing that, we go back to having a centralized source that people come to to get hype about mp3s--in other words, some power is transfered from record companies to these review sites. Think of how MTV, which doesn't actually have its own label, sets the trends and defines what's cool (at least as far as little boys and girls are concerned). I don't mean to say that you idea is evil...it is a good one actually but the following is something that may complement what you are saying as well as keep with the idea of larger audience due to quality and not hype. So, why not use statistics (or whatever) like Amazon.com's "Those who bought this book also bought these" type system. I'm not sure how that would work exactly, but here is what sort of makes sense to me (I'm going to use napster just make the example easier to understand): Say you are logged on to napster. You want to find out which mp3s you should check out. How about having a agent or something: -Pick each song in YOUR list and search for it -Take all results of the search (other people who also have the song) and getting their whole song list -Look for patterns in those lists (some songs that keep appearing in a large number of OTHER people's lists). -Take the list of songs that keep appearing but filter out the ones you already have in your list (so if you have a song from an album, obviously other songs from the same album will also keep apprearing...filter those out) -What you will end up with are songs that seem to have some relation to the original song your agent searched for. In other words, people who like one of your favorites, also seem to like other songs which you might not be aware of. This is just for one song, imagie doing the same thing for your whole song list. There is one problem: This system puts already popular songs at an advantage (since we look for songs that appear often). You could add a parameter that keeps track of a songs "popularity". Say a song is not very popular, may be 10 people out of 10,000 have it. But those 10 people have a bunch of songs that you also have. That means that you might want to try the song...but maybe not many people know about it yet. This is the basic idea, i know there has to be a better and more effecient way of doing something like this. whew...that's it for now.