43 mini-reviews of drm-free and (mostly) independent albums

I purchased copies of, and unless the RIAA succeeds in their creative but wrongful re-imagining of copyright law, the right to fairly use, 43 music albums in 2007. Needless to say every single one was purchased on DRM-free media -- high-bitrate digital MP3s when available, CD when not.

While buying 43 albums/year is well off my ten-year average of 2.44 albums a week, one of the things that caught my attention was that over the past year 84% of the albums were released artists on independent labels, i.e. labels that are not affiliated with the RIAA. Perhaps even the RIAA might start taking note when customers who spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a year on music start giving the vast majority of that to independent artists.

The following is a list of those 43 albums, complete with links to places you can buy them (DRM-free, of course) and links to some external reviews. (The Amazon links have my referral code; if that bothers you then please go to Amazon directly.)

I've also included my own one-sentence review of each album, as well as a restaurant review-style "star" rating. Note that these ratings are not done on a linear 1 to 5 scale. Rather here each star representing something an album needs to earn. To put it in perspective, I can only think of a few albums ever released that would get 5 stars, and since I previewed everything before I bought it, each should have at least 1 star (in theory).

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An aside before I start: the state of music search is abysmal. I spent hours upon hours writing Python scripts to help automate the generation of this list. Amazon was the only site that provided a search API at all, and even that needs some work. In the end I had the best luck using Google search, even to find things on Emusic or Bleep or AllMusic.

If anyone ever wants to fix the situation with music search please drop me an email.

But a big thank you to my friends at RIAA Radar -- keep up the good work!

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And with that, here are the 43 albums I bought in 2007:

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What do you think? Having had a look at my (admittedly arbitrary) tastes, what would you recommend I listen to? I love music, even if these days I don't get to listen to it as much as I'd like. What should I be catching up on in 2008?

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Thanks to John Gruber for his thoughts on stars. Not sure if this will work on Windows. We'll see after I hit "publish", won't we? (Formatted with excessive inline styles to render correctly in feed readers. Not sure about that part either.)

That's odd, it never showed up at all in most blog readers... I doubt it was the stars. Maybe it was just too much HTML?