EPT
Welcome to the second part of my little series. While it was quite "exotic" during part one, now we will look at the "mainstream". But only based upon that Machinae Supremacy is a quite well known band to give away their music (big parts of it) for free! So maybe nothing new now for you!
For those that don't know the band, these guys are from Sweden and play quite an unusual type of mucis. They are playing a genre that was found and named by them: The Sid Metal! "What is Sid?" you are asking? Well if so, you are not working that long with a computer!
The Name originates from the MOS Technology 6581 SID Chip, the sound chip that was used in the famous C64 computer. And Machinae Supremacy are using a "Sid Station", a synthesizer that is based on this chip.
Also because of this many of their songs are based on "old" computer games (i.e. Gianna Sisters) and you will notice many games in their songs. However their "Sideology", where they were interpreting many title melodies, is "on hold" right now. They want to concentrate on their own compositions. But they still stay near computer games: i.e. they recorded the whole soundtrack of the side-scrolling shoot'em up Jets'n'Guns.
Now we are on topic, because you can download the soundtrack for free at their Homepage! But let's start at the beginning:
Around 10 years back this band started to release their music for free as a so called "webrelease". To avoid the endless quarrel between different compression standards they always released their songs not only as MP3 but also as OGG (as for today many are also available as FLAC). However if you want the mentioned soundtrack you have to settle for MP3.
Anyway Machinae Supremacy were able to accomplish - to a certain degree - exactly what fans of free music are "preaching": Because they were giving away their music for free, they made themselve known, built up a fanbase and are now quite successful in the "normal" music business. Ok, because of that some of the "free music culture" is lost, but there is still much left for download in their Webography. Besides it wouldn't surprise me, if the next album would be released for free again. In addition there is no problem to get the other stuff they released, because even if it is not officially available for free they don't have any problems with filesharing - not surprising given their background:
There's a lot of Machinae Supremacy Stuff available on peer-to-peer. But remember folks ... Seed what you leech
In conclusion Machinae Supremacy were among the first to release their songs for free, but it didn't really last until today. So if you want to revel in memories - doesn't matter if the context is "free music" or "classic computer games" - you can't get past this band!
