SIMON COWELL SAYS "HUH?"

Freebies rock. Rock freebies even more so. So if you're tired of contributing $0.99 to Steve Jobs' offshore bonanza every time you crave a good track, especially if it's on the indieish side and off the iTunes mainstream, then you'll love Daytrotter. Every week, Daytrotter gets two featured bands to stop by their Futureappletree Studio One in downtown Rock Island, Ill (gotta love the town name) , play on borrowed instruments, and record 4 sessions each, for a totally of 8 Daytrotter session a week. Run by a bunch of musicians, sound engineers and illustrators, the project is everything that independent music lost when it became the "indie" genre. Good music, plenty of "the" bands, cool illustrations, the SXSW feel without the crowds and the can't-quite-tell-if-it's-piss-or-beer smell...and free downloads of it all. Does it get any better than that?

Brain Pickings' must-get picks: The Slip (sink into the perfect rainy spring day with "Suffocation Keep"), The Little Ones ("Cha Cha Cha" is Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! without the annoying falsetto), Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin (nothing alcoholic Russian about "Oregon Girl"), and Jolie Holland (in "Springtime Can Kill You", Joni Mitchell meets Regina Spektor - and they make out).

NOT FOR THE STRUGGLING MUSICIAN TYPES

From old borrowed instruments to prophets of the digital future: the folks at Gibson have taken it upon themselves to introduce "the first guitar of the 21st century." That's right, the HD.6X-Pro Guitar System (which goes by HD LP) bridges the digital divide between Les Paul and the future. It may look like a plain ol' electric guitar, but it's actually a a complete digital audio system. To commemorate this giant leap forward for the music staple, Les Paul has signed a hundred of these babies. Too bad the price tag is more Bob Dylan than Bob: at $7,999, the signature alone costs $4,000 over the unsigned models, sold exclusively by Sweetwater.

NOT SO EASY BEING GREEN

What's a Brain Pickings edition without a YouTube installment? Sure, you've probably already seen the two-birds-with-one-stone mockery of children's cult television and dar, doped up, self-pitying rockers everywhere, a.k.a. Sad Kermit's rendition of Radiohead's "Creep." (If not, it's time you emerged from under that rock.)

But what's a YouTube sensation without a proper avalanche of follow-up spoofs and responses? Especially if they outsnark the original. Unfortunately, they hardly ever do. In fact, more likely than not, they involve a jealous teenager whose own "original work" raked up 18 views from his "band"mates and their girlfriends, a shaky handheld camera, his parents' living room, and a glimmering hope that the spoofee's popularity will rub off on the spoof. Which hardly ever happens.

Then again, the YouTube empire is built on things so bad they're tangentially good. Kinda like this response to Sad Kermit's crooning tirade. Raw not in the good way, yeah, but we think anything that involves a fat white cat voluntarily humping a muppet is an instant YouTube classic.

WHAT? MORE?

This week, we're all about letting the freebies flow. So if Daytrotter's indie rock scene is a little too narrow for your taste, here's something a little more eclectic, and just as free, to check out. Playlist Mag is great: it brings us reviews of all things music, from the latest products to the latest news stories to what's on music lovers' minds these days. But what's even greater is their selection of free downloads spanning virtually all genres and styles.

Brain Pickings digs: Black On White Affair's dose of solid, old-school, yet supremely fresh funk "Bold Soul Sister, Bold Soul Brother", acoustically brilliant "Shimmer" by Shawn Mullins, upbead in an only-from-a-Nordic-country-way "Call It Ours" by Swedish popsters Legends, Adolphus Bell's indulgently bluesy "The Things I Used To Do", undefinable but oddly infectuous "Did I Let You Down?" by equally oddly named Folksongs For The Afterlife, hypnotic "Desert Stream" by South African jazz/hip-pop formation Egyptian Nursery, and New York jazz trio Tri-Fi's ridiculously good"Gotta Give It Up." You can also find goodies you probably already have in your (proprietary-software-supported) library but won't hurt to rediscover: Pearl Jam, Danger Mouse, Joss Stone, Badly Drawn Boy. Yes, there's a lot and, yes, it's really, really good stuff.

To stay on top of it all, you can even get a latest downloads RSS feed. (In case you're wondering, yep, the whole thing's run by Mac people.)

COMING UP ON GOOGLE'S TO-EAT-UP LIST

Fittingly dubbed a "social music experiment," Project Playlist offers a music searh engine that does for music what Google does for web pages. That's far from all: users can build playlists, which they can email to friends, swap with other users, tag, or post on MySpace and Facebook pages. Project Playlist has its own social networking functions: members can create profiles (ah but of course) and start blogs.

You can browse the playlists, then listen to them right on the website, like this one we dig, by random member Elisabeth Braddock.

Project Playlist is not at all self-involved: their music buzz feature gathers posts from music blogs all over the web, keeping their fingers on the pulse of the hotness du jour and helping you discover new music. The project is still in Beta version, but it seems like a neat concept that holds a ton of promise. Brain Pickings' prediction: the Google lion will be gnawing the bones of this start-up antelope before you can say "$1.65 billion."

ME ME ME

Okay, so we've established we like music, especially free music, but wouldn't it be really cool if we could actually use some of this cool stuff towards the bottom line somehow? Well, now we can: Hank Music brings us a library of thousands of hand-selected tunes from indie record label, licensable for commercial use. Some say sell-out, we say AdCritic. One thing's for sure - this dude (Hank...duh) has a tongue-in-cheek take on the whole commercial vs. indie debate, evident in his quite funny "End of Demo Love" track that welcomes you to the website.

And it's not just licensing - once you create an account, you actually get to download everything for free. Meaning personal use is free, commercial use is how Hank makes his living. The only catch is that once you create an account, your application is "being reviewed" to "be approved" - probably to make sure you're not some random freeloader from a fake company who has no intention whatsoever to license music.

But if you do make the cut, you get to browse those indie gems through a pretty sophisticated, and not too shabbily designed either, search function: browse by genre, mood, tempo or vocal, search artist, label, track title, lyric keyword, or "sounds like." Then save your discoveries to your projects, which you can download, organize and request quotes for. SXSW meets Cannes, swinging by your iTunes library on the way.

IF YOU INSIST

All these freebies, but what if you really, really like paying for music? Or maybe you're one of those near-extinct old-schooler folks for whom nothing compares to holding an actual album in hand?

YourMusic.com's got your back. For $6.99 a month, you get to browse an enormous library of albums and build a music queue. They automatically send you the first CD in your queue each month, with free shipping, and you get access to buy unlimited CD's at the same price - also shipped for free.

It's basically Netflix for music, except you get to keep the CD's. Beats the $10-15 albums run you on iTunes, doesn't impose any proprietary format and sharing restrictions, and gives you something to spin on your index finger while waiting for that elusive creative muse to give you a lap-dance.