fuckyeahfreealbums:

We have been informed by Tumblr that we have to shut down this blog. This comes as no surprise to us running it. It was an experiment to see A. If sharing albums we love desperately would be something people would be interested in and B. How long we could do this for. It turns out we were surprised on both fronts. The amount of interest was just enormous and unprecedented. Thank you for everyone who wrote in, downloaded, re-blogged, liked, etc. It was really inspiring.

We were never trying to make any sort of point about copyrighted information or music downloading. We were just sharing albums as we do between friends. Getting excited about music and wanting to expose like-minded people to new bands. I suppose that comes from us being a product of our generation. Additionally, we talked about starting a separate blog outside of the realm of tumblr serving a similar purpose with the same stylistic choices and you can feel free to follow us on our personal tumblrs (StrangeIdols & AlyssaPandaEyes) to see if/when that project will start.  We have also put up a mailing list if you would like to subscribe to be notified of what we do next.

This blog will be shut down by the end of the night.

With Love

awwwwww, too bad so sad

not really. 

In case you’re reading this well after the blog has closed, this was a tumblr page that had a pretty brief run, in which they made available many great albums completely for free.

I had kind of mixed feelings about this blog - because they had such great taste and were putting up many of my all-time favorite bands and albums, it is always great to see someone else that shares your obscure (and refined) tastes that wants share their good taste and expose others to the music… BUT, that doesn’t excuse the fact that they were completely in the wrong, and doing something that was not only illegal, but really disrespectful to all these great artists.

I wrote to them after they started with the recommendations that if they were going to promote file-sharing and give away entire ALBUMS, that they focus on out-of-print, unavailable, or extremely rare releases - meaning stuff that is really hard to track down, both physically or digitally - or at the very least, put up links to purchase said albums, again both physically or digitally, if applicable.

They didn’t respond, so I can only imagine what they were thinking. I said to them I don’t want to get all long-winded and preachy about file-sharing, and I feel the same way now, BUT this is fucking wrong, plain and simple. I can think of a bunch of ways that they could have done this better: made only a few songs available for download instead of the entire album, linked to streams of the music as opposed to downloads, kept the audio out of it entirely and just plugged the record with writing, etc. I plug music that I like all the time, and the most I’ll do is to upload one track for people to STREAM - thats it. Anything beyond that I feel is disrespectful to the artists, and above all else that is the one thing that I do not want to do. I honestly cannot even imagine the sense of entitlement and laissez-faire attitude that someone must possess to actually be apart of something like this - you claim you love the music so much, and then you completely devalue it and give it away for free without any concern for the people that may be affected. As far as I’m concerned this is sociopathic behavior and I just cannot understand it. As a devoted fan of these artists and as a MANAGER with a stake in the industry, it genuinely hurts.

So even though I really loved the music they posted and would probably geek-out talking music with them in a bar, I say GOOD RIDDANCE to this blog. I hope they grow up and see what they are doing, and figure out a way to promote & share the music without completely raping the artists of their material. 

update: now they’re basking in the glow of their “farewell” praise and posting the comments. The last one I saw said “Thank you for doing god’s work”… yeah, god’s work. Whatever.

Let me be the one to say thank you for giving away albums of the artists you claim to love under the auspices of sharing and spreading good music… the way you guys post this praise seems like you’re really full of yourselves, feeling like martyrs or something. Yeah, you should be sooo proud. Well done.