Songs for Sudan, a new album to benefit Oxfam's work in Darfur -- with tracks by REM, David Gray and others -- has been released, and is only available online. Zero-emissions, refugee-aiding benefit album = tres worldchanging.

Bah. Only available to people running Windows and Internet Explorer (according to the error page I got when I tried to go to the site hosting the album). Mac users and Linux users can apparently go Cheney themselves. As far as I can tell, only available in WMA format, too, so all of you with iPods -- that is, the plurality of people with digital music players -- are out of luck.

OS-restricted, insecure-browser-requiring, DMA-embedded format for digital music? Yuck. :(

Posted by: Jamais Cascio on September 3, 2004 12:57 PM

Bummer. Teach me not to follow the link through to the end...

Posted by: Alex Steffen on September 3, 2004 1:03 PM

It's a great idea, though. Hopefully someone will clue them in on how to better implement it next time, if there is a next time.

Posted by: Emily Gertz on September 3, 2004 7:31 PM

You might want to check out the original grassroots"song for sudan" here. Poetic and haunting, this was the first of the songs for Sudan, created by a multi-ethnic group of musicians hailing from Africa, Europe, and America.

Free, mp3, any os, by the way :)

Posted by: Jim on September 14, 2004 12:32 PM