Where Do You Find Your Foreign Music? 54
Midnight Thunder asks: "There issue of music downloads, and paying for your music, has been discussed many time before here on Slashdot. Generally when you head down to your local music store you are limited to a choice of music adapted to your local market. I tend to find that trying to get hold of non-English music, here in North America, from sources other than P2P file sharing is almost impossible. What do you do if you heard a track on a streaming internet music station, or from a friend with an MP3 version, that is not available in your country, what do you do to get a 'legitimate' copy of the track and reward the artist?"
Emusic (Score:2, Interesting)
The non-western stuff is mainly indian and african but there is a lot of good stuff in there.
http://www.emusic.com
I
Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
Half.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Cheers!
K/J/HK-Pop (Score:3, Interesting)
I also buy most of my movies from them. A lot of the movies can be bought three at a time for $10/each (if you don't buy them in 3s to get the discount, they're usually $12-$15). VCDs are even cheaper if you want to go that route. You can get region-free DVD players from them as well (the Shinsonic is not a bad set, although there is a weird "vertical line ghosting" issue on large blocks of static, dark, solid colors).
I very highly recommend them. One note of warning is that they take a few days to process and ship orders, since they often have to ship some stuff from their HK (I assume) warehouse to California before it will ship out to a US customer. They do seem to have been trimming this turnaround down a little (average delivery time, from time of order, using overnight is now one week), so either they're getting a little more efficient or they know me well enough that I'll keep on coming back spending hundreds each month, as long as they keep me happy. ;-)
Anyway, if you're into Korean, Japanese or Chinese music/movies/etc, definitely give them a look. And, no, I do not work for them or have any relationship with them other than being a very satisfied customer.
Re:Order from Amazon (Score:3, Interesting)
At work I have some Romanian and Tunisian collegues, who brought in their music. When I asked them where the got it, they told be that they either asked a friend who was going over to the country, or downloaded it online, off Kazaa or something of the sorts. It wasn't really the answer I was looking for
I definetly feel that any company that starts providing music online legally would be filling a very evident niche, if they provided music that you can't but from your usual retailers.
Ask Slashdot (Score:2, Interesting)
So they created what they called a ">search engine". It's pretty complicated, but it works out to that if you type something in, it will do a good job of finding what you are looking for. For example, to look for a spanish rock band [google.com], you would type this into one of these search engines. It would give you a list of links, and usually you could find one in the first page, such as Spanish Rock LA.Band Links
Amazingly (isn't this great), you can type in just about anything, even in other languages, and it will always find something. Give it a shot, I'm sure it will work for you.
Ok, now in case anyone is wondering "why are burning karma with this obvious flamebait?", I'll answer you: 99% of the "Ask Slashdot" stories are something that is best asked somewhere else, and if the asker doesn't know anywhere else, try google! This is a question about music! And it's not even "What codec should I use to rip my 600 CDs of Austrian Punk Opera to the best format so that it won't take up much hard drive space, is high quality, will let me stream it over the web, and store it in my custom shoe-based wearable?" Now that is a question for Nerds.
And just to show that I'm only an asshole when I'm pissed off, to answer the question: If your streaming station gives you the name and title of the song (if it doesn't, stop right here and figure that out for yourself), try Google. If the band has a website, it'll find it. No band motivated enough to put together a website will not include a way for you to get their music, so you're golden here. If they have no website, you could always contact the station that plays their music and ask them. If that fails, you'll have to Google The Real World. Ask your friends, family, or the fools at the indie record store if they know anything. Try going out within your city to see if you can find any place that plays that type of music; if you approach the DJ/owner in the right way, they may help you. So I guess it depends on how badly you want to find this music. Good luck.