Or at least my local radio station.

So as much as we’d like to be your only source for musical discovery, and though we’re proud to have, as a staff, the undisputed best music taste on the internet, I’ll have to admit: there are other places you can go for your music.  The ‘machine is a pretty good source of things, but I’d like to be on it more than I’d like to use it.  Usually, I lean on poor Edward here for new music discovery.  Sometimes, I turn on the radio.

Now, most of radio is junk.  Pretty unadulterated junk. It’s good if you want to blast The Fray (who wouldn’t?), but not so good if you want to listen to the Noisettes or even Vampire Weekend.  For that, I turn to my local 88.5, WXPN.  They’re funded in part by the University of Pennsylvania, but local businesses also pitch in, and they have membership drives every so often.  All in all, they operate much like an NPR station: no commercials, mostly good stuff, occasionally annoying membership drives.  They mostly focus on indie/eclectic sounds, so no mashups, but you’ve got the Show for that, right?

They also support “The World Cafe,” a radio and concert series hosted by David Dye.  Through this concert series, they’ve brought several notables like Andrew Bird, Phoenix, Avett Brothers, Grizzly Bear, and a few more to local venues, and several of them, like Andrew Bird, have held free lunch concerts at the radio station that anyone can attend.  All in all, it’s a great source for free music, and a great asset to the city of Philly.  It’s why I’ve decided to become a member recently, and for my pains, they sent me the latest compilation of recordings from these lunch time concerts.

If you’d like to listen to them online for free, you can do so at http://www.xpn.org.  Their stream will open right into the mp3 app of your choice, and you can listen away!  If you wanna hear some of the tracks from the World Cafe, they are below.

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(Download) this music.

Crying – TV on the Radio (World Cafe Live) (YSI)

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Daniel- Bat for Lashes (World Cafe Live) (YSI)

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Just Like Heaven – The Cure (World Cafe Live) (YSI)

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