The importance of Musicgroups for Sceners, even for Amiga Sceners is getting higher and higher. The reasons for this trend are clear and simple: On the one hand the musicians who publish their songs through those MusicGroups have big problems to get paid deals with a professional recording label but if they spread their stuff via a wellknown MusicGroup, they can be sure it will be leeched and heard by many people. This is also a way to get the own name more wellknown, but is it enough to establish yourself enough, so the headhunters of the recording companies become interested?? One should highly doubt that, but not everybody`s seeking for a deal and much money to earn. Many also simply wanted to find a platform for their hobby and track their songs for fun.

On the other hand: Their music is for free this way, they won`t earn a single buck for all the efforts they`ve spend on tracking. Good for us who can access many great works for free, but not so cool for the musicians...







Quality or Quantity??

It depends on the label itself, the quality of songs beeing slammed around in the net varies from great down to poor. But some labels such as Tokyo Dawn Records, Mono, UpRough, Disciples of Ageema and many others grant for good stuff!! Some of these labels are already sub-professional and obviously goal to enter the world of the professional musicbusiness the sooner or later. It could not be better, could it? The only thing you have to do is to visit their site, inform yourself if the musicstyle they offer fit your needs, and then you simply target your browser to leech their latest works. And what they want us to download is mostly better than that which is played in the regular charts. Not to forget that compared to play MP3 songs from the charts collecting those modules is legal as there`s no copyright for this kind of freeware.

To debate if the track XY or group YZ is good or not surely doesn`t make sense. Music is also like painting, modelling etc. a sort of art - and all arts are a question of taste. It`s up to your own taste if you like the one or other musicstyle or not. Just browse a bit through the list of links from SCENET, try the one or other track, follow some links and you`ll soon be satisfied! At the SCENET homepage (http://scenet.de) you can also find a lot more sites dealing with computermade music. Most of them offer nice pieces to listen if the 102 MusicGroups at the end of this article aren`t enough for you.





PC rocks?? Nope, not here!!

Most composing tools on the PC like the FastTracker look rather poor even if you compare it with a stoneold version of the Protracker coded in 1992 or 93!! If you try to compare it with the latest version of the PT or even with the multichannel editor Digibooster, they cannot compete in any way!!! Especially because most of them are plain DOS programs with all their contras as they can`t offer any GUI. The original goal of the programmers seemingly was to create a Protracker clone on the PC. And yes, for many musicians who don`t know it better, it works out well, but the option to use up to 32 channels alone cannot wipe away the fact that these are really poor applications. It`s really time for a new generation of tracking programs on the PC working with a graphical user interface and all the options a modern program like DigiBooster is offering. The other possibility would be to switch on the lonesome Amiga (or emulator) in order to try out how things work on our platform.

Please also have a look at Scenet's hotlinks section for music-links and at the interviews-section including interviews with various musicians!