I ultimately bought from both Amazon and CD Baby. Got the "big budget indie" CDs (Kaki King and The Decemberists) from Amazon, not wanting the hassle of using their individual purchase sites since they're bigger bands.

CD Baby did have three of my 56 wanted artists; "very indie" artists with less record label muscle (Tartufi, The Trophy Wives, and The Weepies). I got sucked into CD Baby, obsessed with consolidating my order to avoid giving my credit card to many tiny CD distributors. The CDs were available on Amazon, oddly, at much higher cost than CD Baby (except used, where they were dirt cheap, likely promos or radio discs).

Are there any other indie CD clearing houses which are very close to the artists like CD Baby? It seems like a drag (security risk) to enter my credit card information into each band's tiny CD selling site; but I'll do it.

Billy:

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Download it for free, and then mail them a check.

I've considered it. Saddly, the bands I seek aren't popular enough to be traded online or owned by anyone that I know. Oh, and the scenario: "Hi band-I-like, I illigally downloaded your music, here's a check with my name and address on it" might get me in trouble.

hybrid8:

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online initiative ... find music you'd be interested in based on existing listening habits and ratings.

Google Music Trends anyone? How long until unscrupulous bands set up "play bots" on Google Talk, playing their album over and over to increase their rank on GMT.

julf:

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Unfortunately leading them to only listen to "similar" music.

True, but how far should our musical tastes diverge? How "similar" do you mean? This really has me curious.

The SXSW compilation seemed "similar" to one of my musical tastes - rock/pop/folk/punk. To anyone who sampled the comp, are those songs similar to eachother? Compared to my other tastes, they are all similar.

To find "different" music, should we venture uninformed into random radio stations, venues, CDs, mp3 streams, etc? Or should we pick our friends' brains for what "else" they like; or find new friends who like "different" music?

Hm, maybe I'm trying to validate that I'm not exposing myself to "the same old music". If I am, how can I find stuff that's different?