Besieged
October 2000
Rudy Left. Surround. Road Array. Nixon Landslide. Burning Coals. Days Summer Days. Firehose. Teasze Me. Non Sequitur 15.
Rudy Left
September 2000
Rudy Left. Windy Ridge. Bush League. Besieged by Reality. Transmission. Calculus Two. Veggie Stew.
Road Array
June 2000
Road Array. Facial. More Tea For Me. Tireless. Green Stream. Lost. Armsley Square. Flies.
Surround
March 2000
Latent Image. Surround. So Long I Sold You. Urban Plowman. Deeper in Debt (Jerry). You Want to Fly. Driving Two.
Digital Judge
November 1999
Finding My Anonymity. Or a Little Faster. Winter at Halfway House. Marooned with Mary Ann. Down the Pyro Lawn. Finding My Serenity. Gonna Walk. Deeper in Debt. November. Trashed Your Room. Finding My Tax Return. Run to the Snare. Football You Bet. I Demand a Japanese Car. Side of the Grove.
Or a Little Faster
July 1999
(deleted from CD catalog October 2000)
Or a Little Faster. Down the Pyro Lawn. Or a Little Rougher. Bucharest Sweat. Dial 911 at Boulder.
Firehose MaxiDisc
April 1999
(deleted from CD catalog October 2000)
Short Firehose. Taped Firehose. Ritalin Wail. Broken Beerlobe. Firehose. You Want to Fly. Fresh Firehose.
Firehose MiniDisc
April 1999
(deleted from CD catalog September 1999)
Short Firehose. Ritalin Wail. Broken Beerlobe. Fresh Firehose.
Cheating at Solitaire
February 1999
(deleted from CD catalog September 1999)
Burning Coals. Days Summer Days. Firehose. Teasze Me.
Of all of those, "Digital Judge" was my favorite, since I broke a rule that had existed for decades before my birth. This album had THREE sides (each of which began with a "Finding..." song).
All of the songs except "Non Sequitur 15" were instrumentals, and while I have CDs with the MP3s stashed away somewhere, I have long since lost the original lossless files (most of the songs were created on a Macintosh, and I haven't owned a Mac in over a decade).
After mp3.com went bye-bye, I preserved "Non Sequitur 15" on a geocities page...and then I uploaded a few files (including "Non Sequitur 15" and six new 2009 songs) to last.fm. The last.fm Music Manager worked out well for me, allowing me to upload both music and artwork for a collection that I called "Brevity Is."
Then geocities went bye-bye, and last.fm was the only site that hosted any of my mp3s.
I've been thinking about creating some new music again, and I began to check out various sites that could host my music. One option, of course, was to just upload the files to last.fm via the Music Manager.
But then when I went to my last.fm artist page to check my albums, I noticed something odd.
Yup, that's right - my "Brevity Is" album and its artwork are gone.
Things weren't much better when I got to the tracks page.
Yes, all the tracks are there (although they are no longer associated with albums)...but there's no way to play them from last.fm. I could play them if my songs were also on Spotify...but they're not.
So I went to the Music Manager page to sort this all out.
Of course, if I had checked Wikipedia earlier, I would have known all of this.
In January 2014, the website announced on-demand integration with Spotify and a new YouTube-powered radio player. Upon the introduction of the YouTube player, the standard radio service became a subscriber-only feature.
On 26 March 2014, Last.fm announced they would be discontinuing their streaming radio service on 28 April 2014. In a statement, the site said the decision was made in order to "focus on improving scrobbling and recommendations"....
In 2016, Music Manager was discontinued and music uploaded to the site by musicians and record labels became totally inaccessible; post-Spotify integration they could still be played and downloaded (where the option was given) but following this change not even the artists themselves are able to access their songs in the Last.fm catalogue.
From a business standpoint this makes sense, since last.fm in 2016-2017 is facing the same issues that mp3.com faced in 2003. The last.fm business model doesn't really allow support of someone with a couple of thousand plays.
Of course, there are other music hosting services...
Postscript: More on my song naming of mp3 and midi files (the midis are at that same ad-infested Tripod site).
