Give me music recs.

[elwen]

I've discovered Ruckus, a site that provides free (legal) music downloads for college students. The catch is that you have to pay if you want to burn them or transfer them to a portable player.

My "problem" now is that I don't listen to enough popular music to be able to take good advantage of the service. I've already gotten a bunch of songs that I hear a lot on the radio, but my mind draws a blank on what else I would want.

So, recommend me some music. Preferably specific tracks or albums, but I'll take artists, too, since Ruckus lists popular tracks and I can just start with those.

On a related note, Ruckus has the most awful website ever. First of all, it loads really slowly and takes several redirects upon first entering the site. Second, there is a bug on its search forms such that if you do a new search from a search results page, regardless of the option you select, it will search by album. [The one search criterion I would never use, since my brain doesn't organize songs by album unless it's something like a soundtrack.] Third, perhaps to make the service seem less "on-demand" and thus acceptable to the RIAA, you can't do compound searches. So trying to find a song with a really common title is pretty hard. The related piece, which may also be an RIAA-appeasing aspect, is that you can only access track listings after clicking on an album title, either from the artists' page or the search results. [So that looking up the artist and then finding the song from there is not particularly more effective than searching for the song title.] This is really, really annoying. Because, as mentioned above, I don't keep track of albums, and because most of the time I encounter songs in contexts where I just don't know the album, such as hearing it on the radio.

But I guess I get what I pay for.

Comments

[thierrys.livejournal.com]

Actually! Our school offered Ruckus for free, but yeah, as mentioned you have to pay extra if you want to actually "have" the music. Not to mention but you can only play it in Ruckus player. Also the number of songs they have is kind of limited, and at least as of last year, even if you pay moneys, the songs won't work on ipods even if they work on other mp3 players.

What kind of music do you like? Their soundtrack selection is really good. As for "pop", do you like Imogene Heap at all?

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

You can definitely play the downloaded songs in Winamp. You just have to find where the songs are downloaded to, and they're just regular WMAs (albeit heavily DRM'ed to prevent you from burning/transferring). I bet the iPod thing is because Apple has some kind of agreement with the RIAA that the iTunes store is the only place you can get DRM'ed songs that work on iPods or something like that.

I've been pretty impressed with their selection so far, but that might just be because I usually barely skim the surface of those genres.

I like bouncy things like eurodance, and I like rap. But I'll listen to pretty much anything except country. Never heard of Imogene Heap, but I will check it out.

[ling84.livejournal.com]

Hm. I never got Yahoo! Music Engine's annoyingly heavily DRM-ed WMAs to work properly with Winamp. That thing had the lousiest interface on earth. I only got it because someone donated a free trial year to every undergrad during my senior year.

Imogen Heap is good - I love her "Say Goodnight And Go". If you're into more angsty female pop with cool electronic effects, try Dido. (I can sound just like her during karaoke.) Alanis Morissette always has the wisest lyrics. I love Green Day in both grown-up and immature rocker incarnations ("American Idiot" is amazing). For more eurodancy stuff, try Kate Ryan and Cascada.

I'm not a great source of inspiration for good contemporary music because I listen to a lot of weird stuff (soundtracks and pop in nearly every language possible :P). That, and I'm listening to more J-pop now as a result of anime-watching. :D