Mashable's "Free Music Mondays" - Great Stuff!

Long-time readers of this blog know I'm a big Mashable fan (one of the great social media and tech blogs out there, I think).

For some reason, one of the regular posts that I had generally ignored is the "Free Music Monday" posts. I don't know whether I was just too busy to really check them out or what, but I usually ignored them. They always sounded interesting, but I never took the time.

Basically musical artists offer up free tracks (sometimes whole CDs!) that Mashable then links to. This gives the artists great exposure (Mashable's audience is freakin' huge!) and it gives the listener a chance to try some new artists out and see if they can find somebody they really like.

I finally decided to go ahead and see what I was missing with this week's post, however. Not because any of the bands in particular looked attractive to me, but just because I was going to be sitting at my desk at work for an extended period of time and I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try this stuff out.

Am I glad I did.

The cool thing about Mashable's article is that it gives you a good description of not just the type of music (Indie, Hard Rock, Pop, etc), but also a little bit about the band itself and what style they have.

In doing so, I got to listen to some really great music. I'm only going to link to the Mashable article in order to give them some (ok, not much) traffic, but you can find the download links on their site.

The first one I downloaded was a New York band called "The Seams." Mashable classifies them as "Indie" (I'm not even sure what that means), but I decided to go ahead and download the whole album, because they're offering it for free on their site.

I am not a music critic, and I really don't know that much about the current music scene. Their sound is really familiar, though my knowledge of the music scene precludes me actually naming what bands they sound like (I wouldn't want to tar them with a bad brush if I got the comparison wrong). They are songs that you could easily hear on the radio, though. The CD (if you can even call it that when you download all the songs) is called "Spanish American," and it is truly excellent. Since it's a free download, why don't you give them a try?

The next one I tried was a "Glorious Noise" compilation from the Exploding Sound label. This compilation has rock songs from twenty different artists, and they all have different sounds. Some are softer while others are harder with some great guitar riffs. If you like modern rock at all, there's going to be something on this CD to like.

I also tried the one track Mashable had from a band called Pretty Mighty Mighty, classified as Alternative Rock. The song is "Ten Minutes". This one was pretty good, too. They're from Columbus, Ohio, which piqued my interest for familial reasons.

Finally, I tried InAshton, and their CD called "Red." They're another New York-based modern rock group and most of the songs on the CD were excellent.

Obviously, this isn't a music review, as I know nothing about music and how to critique it, which is why these descriptions aren't that detailed. But I do know what I liked, and these were all great downloads. Since they're free, if you like that type of music, why don't you go check them out? There are other genres on there that you might like.

And maybe there will be something on Mashable's future (or past, even) Free Music Mondays that you want to check out too?

How can you go wrong with "free?"