[UPDATE: Torrent links removed as courtesy to artists] As we said above, all of these direct Amazon links have audio previews, and some of them have exclusive Amazon-only free downloads, so there’s really no need to torrent. Have fun!

50. Woods – Songs of Shame

Amazon|

49. Cass McCombs – Catacombs

Amazon|

48. DOOM – Born Like This

Amazon|

47. Zomby – Where Were U in ’92?

Amazon|

46. Dan Deacon – Bromst

Amazon|

45. The Mountain Goats – The Life of the World to Come

Amazon|

44. tUnE-yArDs – BiRd-BrAiNs

Amazon |

43. Cymbals Eat Guitars – Why There Are Mountains

Amazon|

42. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Ashes Grammar

Amazon|

41. Baroness – Blue Record

Amazon|

40. Mos Def – The Ecstatic

Amazon |

39. Jim O’Rourke – The Visitor

Amazon|

38. Major Lazer – Guns Don’t Kill People…Lazers Do

Amazon|

37. The Antlers – Hospice

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36. Dinosaur Jr. – Farm

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35. jj – jj n° 2

Amazon|

34. Passion Pit – Manners

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33. Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue

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32. Bear in Heaven – Beast Rest Forth Mouth

Amazon|

31. Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions

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30. Röyksopp – Junior

Amazon|

29. Yo La Tengo – Popular Songs

Amazon|

28. Micachu and the Shapes – Jewellery

Amazon|

27. Various Artists – 5: Five Years of Hyperdub

Amazon|

26. Bon Iver – Blood Bank EP

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25. DJ Quik and Kurupt – BlaQKout

Amazon|

24. Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle

Amazon|

23. Memory Tapes – Seek Magic

Amazon|

22. Wild Beasts – Two Dancers

Amazon|

21. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone

Amazon|

20. Real Estate – Real Estate

Amazon | Torrent

19. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Amazon|

18. Atlas Sound – Logos

Amazon |

17. The Very Best – Warm Heart of Africa

Amazon|

16. Antony and the Johnsons – The Crying Light

Amazon|

15. Japandroids – Post Nothing

Amazon|

14. Neon Indian – Psychic Chasms

Amazon|

13. St. Vincent – Actor

Amazon|

12. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz!

Amazon|

11. Fuck Buttons -Tarot Sport

Amazon|

10. Girls – Album

Amazon |

9. Fever Ray – Fever Ray

Amazon|

8. Phoenix -Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Amazon |

7. Bat For Lashes – Two Suns

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6. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

Amazon|

5. Raekwon – Only Built for Cuban Linx Part II

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4. The Flaming Lips – Embryonic

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3. The XX – The XX

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2. Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca

Amazon|

1. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

Amazon|

It’s somehow telling that there’s only one derogatory name for Canadians, and even that one’s pretty friendly sounding. I mean, who could get mad about being called a Canuck? I’ve been marveling for a while at the explosion of indie bands over the past several years, whether from the American scene, the Balkans, Japan, Iceland, or even in the form of surprisingly un-incongruous German Reggae. It’s almost impossible to keep up! And thanks to our kind & sensible friends north of the border, now I have even more to catch up with. I hadn’t noticed until recently how many bands creeping onto my playlist were Canadian: Arcade Fire, The New Pornographers, A.C. Newman, Feist, Great Lake Swimmers, Mother Mother… I think there are more, but my version of Winamp doesn’t seem to have a “sort by country” tab. But wait! There’s more! Okay, a generic list of over 200 bands isn’t very useful. Here’s a Wikipedia entry that describes the scenes a little bit, and here’s a list of 33 favorites picked by Canadian music bloggers. Guess I have some listening to do. If any of the stuff I haven’t listened to yet is half as brilliant as the The New Pornographers’ Myriad Harbour video featured here, I’ll be one ecstatic listener. Know of any Canadian indie bands worth checking out? Feel free to share.

Here’s a playlist of Canadian stuff I’ve been listening to. If you buy through Amazon, not only does the band sell a unit, but I make some chump change too:

Mother Mother’s “O My Heart” is pretty cool too…

Two different musicians asked me recently if a couple thousand dollars was a reasonable quote for a basic web site. I said “Absolutely” and then immediately added “but don’t do it”. Interestingly, both were asking for my expertise (I do have a little) but neither were asking me to do the work. Musicians are cheap bastards. I should know, I’m a recovering musician. So why did I tell them not to bother? Because almost everything you would want a web site to do for your band – streaming music, streaming video, user interaction, downloads, etc – is available as a free service elsewhere, with widgets that you can easily embed not only in a very simple site of your own, but in the billions of pages that are the Internet as well. Ask yourself the rather silly (but oft-overlooked) question: Do I want to spend a bunch of money building a destination site of my own and stuggling with SEO to get people to see it, or do I want my music on my site, several other massively trafficked music sites, and thousands of Facebook, Friendfeed, and other Social Networking pages? So the great thing is that whereas this wasn’t really possible even a year ago, there are a slew of sites now that make this absurdly simple. The embedded player from SoundCloud that’s featured below took about five minutes from account setup to embedding to create. For the record, it’s some soundtrackish dreck I did a few years ago for a benefit CD for Kenya-based Amara Conservation. But we’re not showcasing the music, we’re showcasing SoundCloud. They’re just one player in an emerging scene that is sort of like “YouTube” for audio. Below are some of the other key players.

Bandcamp lets you utilize your own page design, with URL’s like YourBandName.bandcamp.com. You control the pricing from free to user-selected. Also offers sharing and embedding tools, visitor stats, metadata editing, and fast downloads.

Last month Wired said SoundCloud “Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era”. Soundcloud doesn’t focus on building a comprehensive set of services, they focus on doing one very well, and very simply: sharing, embedding, and streaming music.

TopSpin offers all of the features mentioned above, but is aimed at the professional working artist. If you already have physical media, a fan base, some social networking set up, and meet all of their other criteria, TopSpin is a site to keep an eye on.

You may or may not have followed Muxtape’s meteoric rise and takedown,  but in any case, they’re back, and they’re restructuring to offer the same services as sites like TopSpin. As of this writing, you can only join if invited by another band, but this is supposed to change.

Tunecore doesn’t offer the sharing/embedding features we’re talking about themselves, but they allow you to upload files to get them placed on iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon MP3, eMusic, Sony Connect, MusicNet and Napster.

If you really have an interest in succeeding in pop music, there’s one way to avoid having to do many of the things we’ll suggest in this piece: be an absolutely f***ing brilliant songwriter with solid musicians to play your broadly accessible music. Then some top-notch management will find you, and your only battle after that will be not getting screwed by all the deals you’ll be offered. Since you almost certainly don’t have that particular set of attributes in your possession, ask yourself a few more questions about why you’re seeking to promote your music: Do you want to make a living at it? Are you convinced for some reason the world just needs to be exposed to your genius? Do you think you might have some reasonably marketable music, and wouldn’t mind getting paid for it? Have you been hitting the crack pipe pretty hard again? The fact is that even the established music industry has one of the highest failure rates of almost any business, and you’ll be entering one of the “noisiest” markets on the planet, alas, with a “naked” product. For some interesting thoughts about the new marketplace, check out Digital Music Can’t Be Marketed, which points out that you can’t really package and deliver your music, your only hope is to be “found”.

So out of the thousands of sites on the web that focus on indie music distibution, which one should you focus on? The simple answer is: Don’t worry about it yet. You have a long list of things work on first. Unless you’re a Lo-fi artist, get a decent master. I did live sound for several years, have had a home studio, and have worked with some great engineers in “real” studios. Give up the idea that you’ll create market-ready music on your cracked version of Logic Studio. Devote the first part of your budget to having tracks that are actually worth releasing, something you almost certainly won’t achieve without real studio time and quality mastering. While you’re busy breaking up the band by fighting over final tracks and money, get a UPC Bar Code. You’ll be using those a lot. Also make sure you’ve gone over a legal checklist like this one, because to actually make money, you’ll need copyrights and you’ll probably want to join BMI and ASCAP, among other things.

If this first round of work hasn’t “knocked the stew outa ya”, think about the realities of the current marketplace. The same thing that makes the fantastic new indie marketplace possible makes it almost impossible to cut through the noise. The buzzword for a while has been Social Networking, a phrase that is quickly becoming the next most-overused and utterly meaningless phrase in the business world. Use the term, and people immediately say “oh, like Twitter and Facebook, right?“, which is kind of a brain-dead view. You can’t overlook this as a marketing angle, but you’ll have to find the type of networking that works for you. MySpace Music is currently a no-brainer, but in terms of actually putting social networking to work, you have to have a sense of where your likely audience is active, and focus there. What makes a lot more sense is to have a decent product in the first place, and to use any guerrilla or viral marketing method at your disposal. In an ideal world, you would get written up in a top-level site like PopMatters.com,  DrownedInSound.com,  or PitchforkMedia.com, but without some smart management and PR, this isn’t likely to happen early on. Think about video, and think about YouTube. The indie band Matt & Kim – while relative uknowns a year or so ago – are now making the decisions that any indie artist would love to be struggling with, like: should we sell out to Mountain Dew ? One of the things that propelled them into the pop press was simply getting naked, and putting it on YouTube.

Granted, perhaps neither you nor your potential fans want you naked, but there are other clever approaches to this kind of marketing. We’ll cover that topic, explain why you shouldn’t waste money on your own web site, and provide a roundup of digital distribution channels in Part III.

If you listen to pop music with any regularity and intelligence, you may have noticed an extremely high suck quotient in the major label releases of the past couple of years. This, while the quantity of really high quality indy material has grown almost exponentially and provided the artist with a higher income-making potential while unit prices plummeted. Well, someone else seems to have noticed too, and made a film about it. Perhaps a bit melodramatically titled, Before the Music Dies features interviews and performances with Erykah Badu, Eric Clapton, Dave Matthews, Branford Marsalis, ?uestlove and a wide variety of others. The film promises to explore the phemomena of “the homogenous corporate product that is spoonfed to consumers and the diverse independent music that finds devoted fans online and at clubs across the country”. The teaser with Erykah Badu, left, is hilarious.