Help feed my bad music addiction!

July 9, 2009 8:45 AM

Looking for safe places to download Russian music from!

I've been obsessively streaming this Russian dance music radio station lately (I know, I know....it makes my work day more fun).

Anyhoo, some of this music is pretty fun and I'd love to be able to add some of it to my iPod for working out. Also, if they have some awesome Vladimir Vysotsky too that'd be super. The cd's I bought when I was in Russia are scratched--very sad.

I'm looking for sites anyone has used where I can download specific songs without fear of a SkyNet type program being installed on my computer. Or heck, even buying some "old fashioned" CD's!

I can understand a fair bit of Russian, but if sites need my billing information, obviously I'd prefer that they have English translations.

I'm already an Emusic member, but they don't really have what I'm looking for. It can get a little tough googling for specific artists/songs because of the translation from the Cyrillic alphabet to our Roman alphabet.

Much thanks!

posted by Zoyashka to media & arts (4 comments total)

Are you looking for more poppy-songs-actually-sung-in-Russian, or dance-y club tunes/beats with fewer lyrics?
posted by mdonley at 10:23 AM on July 9, 2009

Thanks for checking mdonley--I'm looking to download specific songs that are played on that station (they stream the title and artist name)...they are Russian artists (as far as I can tell) and everything is sung in Russian.
posted by Zoyashka at 10:36 AM on July 9, 2009

Look into using Streamripper to save the songs played on that station. Streamripper is pretty good about splitting by song and is cross-platform: I've used it with: Winamp on Windows as a plugin, foobar2000 on Windows as a relay/recorder for internet radio, and XMMS on Linux.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 10:58 AM on July 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

Streamripper, by the way.

If you can pin a proper genre on things, you could try searching Discogs.com for more Russian releases. For example, I searched for country: russia style: house, and there are some decent looking results, though some of these might be Russian releases of house music made elsewhere. Add format: mp3 and you see House music released as MP3s on Russian labels (typically).

This isn't a music downloading site, but a site that catalogs releases and links the artists and labels to their various works. You could ask the people who own these releases if they could tell you where they bought them, or check if the labels and artist sites have legit downloads. You might even find Russian net-labels (who focus on digital distribution, free or otherwise)
posted by filthy light thief at 12:14 PM on July 9, 2009