Of the top 10 most popular posts on this site last month, all but two were drawn from the Downstream department of free and legal recommended downloads — that’s out of a total of 42 posts for the month, July 2011.
The non-download entries were ones that attracted a substantial amount of reader comments: (1) a list of “6 Things That Might Make the Great Soundcloud.com Even Greater” and (2) a consideration of how images and sounds are handled in copyright law, on the occasion of a legal settlement in regard to Kind of Bloop, a collection of chiptune cover versions of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (“Some Say, ‘Freeloader.’ Others Say, ‘So What?'”).
This leaves the seven most popular Downstream entries: (3) sounds committed on a tape loop as elegant as it is ambitious, by Jared Smyth, (4) a track off the new Kim Cascone album, The Knotted Constellation (Fourteen Rotted Coordinates), (5) a voice + processing collaboration between Prophecy Sun and Kristen Roos, who record as Spell, (6) a video (with downloadable audio) performance on the Monome by Josh Saddler, aka ioflow, (7) variations on sine waves by C. Reider, (8) manipulated field recordings by Mark Rushton, (9) ambient jazz collaboration by heu{s-k}ach (the duo of d’incise and Marcel Chagrin) and Pedro Sousa, and (10) the latest instrumental hip-hop from Hypoetical.
Among the most popular search requests were: bloop, app, ben neill, best of 2010, dj krush, downstream, early 1970s field recordings, EP, inception, ionizer, kind of bloop, klock, n4tural, outra-g, oval, pausal, privatelektro, radiophonic, reider, and twitter.com.