For a while now, I've been passing around mix CDs of music made by Houston-based bands & musicians, forcing the CDs on friends & family with the manic, "why don't you all understand?" zeal of a fresh-faced missionary kid knocking on apartment complex doors at 9AM on a Saturday so he can spread The Good Word. (Except that in my case, obviously, the salvation I'm selling is musical; come to think of it, though, there is a spiritual side to that, but eh...)

The reactions I've received range from "what the fuck is this shit?" to "if they're not on the radio, they must not be very good" (and no, I'm not making that one up, although I wish I was) to "holy crap, this is great!" I've learned a few things about people, been surprised at how bland and unthinking some people's musical tastes are, and made a handful of converts. When somebody joins the fold, even temporarily (meaning that they're probably not going to run out and buy their own copy of News on the March's debut EP once they've listened to all of my copy), it brightens my day, seriously.

Of course, more ears are (almost always) better, so I've been trying to figure out a way to do something with this here Space City Rock site to make my little mixes available to all who feel like listening. Some might recall the Muxtape thing from a while back -- it was/is a handy little Web-based interface that let you upload whatever songs you felt like uploading and just sending people to a handy link to listen (i.e., spacecityrock.muxtape.com). Sadly, though, the musical-enjoyment-destroying evil overlords at the RIAA stepped in and whacked the Muxtape site down, hard, and the old SCR muxtape died a too-early death.

Muxtape is back up now, btw, although my muxtape and account are dead & gone -- thanks to the RIAA's machinations, the site's creators had to scrap their initial idea and instead retool the site to be more of a promotional tool for bands & indie-ish record labels to put their own stuff (meaning, "stuff they own") up on the muxtapes. Kind of like what sites like Purevolume (and others, although I'm blanking on which ones) have already done for a while now. Dang.

Never fear, though, because we've already bid our farewells to that endeavor and moved on to an open-source deal called Opentape, which has a very similar interface but is installed on your (er, our) own server. You can check it out at its very own URL: opentape.spacecityrock.com. I haven't yet tried to customize it much, although I may at some point later on if I'm feeling industrious -- the app's front-end is apparently pretty flexible.

Plus, the app lets you create a cool little player within other Web pages, which is something I've wanted to do for a looooong time (esp. now that The Skyline Network's down & has taken its cool player with it):

So there you go -- I'll be adding (and probably removing) songs to it sporadically, so check on back & see what's new. I'll most likely be sticking w/newer stuff for the moment, but may throw on some scene-oldies every once in a while. Anything that goes up there is stuff that I think is particularly cool, song-wise, and shouldm't be taken as the be-all and end-all of what's good in Houston music, so if you're in a band and you don't see a song of yours on there, please don't take offense. Odds are I'll put a song of yours up there one of these days. (Assuming you're any good, of course.)

On the flipside, like I said way back when with the muxtape thing: if you happen to be in a band whose song(s) I've got on the mixtape, and you don't want to be on there for whatever reason, just email me at "gaijin" at "spacecityrock dot com" and I'll get it off there asap. I don't want to get on the wrong end of anybody's lawyer or (more likely) get punched in the face by anybody the next time I hit the bars...

Labels: Admin Stuff, H-Town News, Musical Crap, Random Rambling, Things To Hear

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