It’s a couple days before I leave for the grand U S of A, and I figured I would share a gem of the internet I discovered while I was here. Well, discovered lends me too much credit. I shamelessly stole this addy from my Korean host’s bookmark list when he wasn’t looking.

The site is www.bugs.co.kr

I obviously haven’t had the chance to try it out from the states, so I don’t know if it’s banned or restricted. But I have to say it’s quite incredible. The site is similar to Amazon.com. You can search for artists and look up their songs, discography, album pics, ect. Unlike Amazon, which will allow you to preview perhaps 10s of select tracks, you can usually listen to the whole album. For free. In a winamp-ish minibrowser window. If you have an account with the site you can even save tracks to a custom playlist. What it boils down to is that you don’t need to own a single CD, just an internet connection and IE (it won’t work in mozilla). I can’t vouch for the audio quality; I’ve been listening with cheapy headphones on my laptop.

So provided you can connect to the site, you will see a smattering of Korean. Actually, you’ll probably see a bunch of “???” or ASCII characters since I doubt you’ll even have Korean installed on your computer. No matter though, simply click “Music” at the top menu, then fill in the band or track name you want to search for in the (only) text box. I’ll not insult your intelligence any further; you should be able to get the band playing in your ears in no time from there. If the audio icons next to the tracks are greyed out, then they’ve been told to stop offering those songs. Some of the most popular bands (U2) will have all of their albums greyed out, but other, more obscure bands may be fully available for listening. Don’t try to download the music, that option isn’t offered. Though I suspect that the tracks are placed on the computer somewhere…

There’s a rumor that this site will start requiring a paid membership in the near future (2-3 months) so get your headphones on now. I’ve found this is a great way to preview bands you’d never have had the monetary guts to risk earlier. But of course, if you like something, buy the CD. Artists get paid too little as it is…

I’m done here.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2004 at 6:48 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.