Tag: music

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music on the net

I’ve only just started getting into music blogs, but they’re fabulous. Of the ones I visit at the moment, the ones which I’ve taken most music from are PopText and Funky16Corners, but I’m currently listening to a 70 minute mix of ‘dancehall/bashment, reggaeton, R’n’B/hip hop/crunk, soca, reggae and ragga jungle’ from Heatwave which I learned about via Mudd Up!. And my award for best design goes to Cocaine Blunts and Hip-Hop Tapes, though it would be even better without frames, imho.

And in answer to the obvious question – yes, I’ve already been persuaded to buy music (with actual money) which I wouldn’t have otherwise, so I’m not completely being a parasite.

[EDIT: having done some internet research, I now actually know what reggaeton is: Puerto Rican reggae-influenced hip hop – the booty-shaking face of globalisation, basically. ‘Bashment’ is still a mystery. Sounds good, though; I’d recommend that mix I mentioned and I’m now listening to a reggaeton mix from the same people.]

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On the subject of iTunes

I’m sure this is old news to a lot of you, but humour me.

I’m amazed by how much it has changed my listening experience, having all my music on the computer. I didn’t actually intend to put all my music on the hard disk when I got the computer – the CD player is within easy reach of my desk anyway, and I don’t have an mp3 player – but I tried it out mainly because I wanted to play with the software on my new machine. What makes the difference isn’t the way that all your music is at your fingertips, although that’s nice. It’s that I have a whole load of albums which I like, but don’t particularly want to listen to all of at once. The simple fact that the computer mixes up tracks from different albums breathes life into your collection, just because you don’t have to take the decision to listen to a whole hour of acid house, or Breton folk, or early blues, or whatever it might be.

I thought that if was going to make a lot of use of the playlist function it would be making playlists like ‘funky stuff’ or ‘easy-cheesy’ or ‘Americana’: specific selections to suit my mood. In fact my main playlist completely ignores genre and mood; it consists of a combination of:

high-rated songs that haven’t been played for four days
unrated songs that haven’t been played for two weeks
current favourites

Oddly enough, the fact that the playlist might go ‘Charles Aznavour – The Prodigy – Bob Marley’ isn’t as much of a problem as I would have expected. I thought that switching between wildly different kinds of music would just be annoying – but actually I quite like the variety.

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A silly new feature!

I’ve added a list of music I’m currently listening to in the sidebar on the left. It uses a neat little WordPress plugin called WP-Scrobbler that grabs the info from your Audioscrobbler feed. So that list on the left automatically updates as I listen to music thorough iTunes. Or at least I think it updates every six minutes.

The default setting is to give the song title, artist and date and time for each song. That seemed like too much information, so I’ve got it just giving the last eight artists. But if you click on the name of an artist, it’ll link you to the Last.fm page for the particular song I listened to.

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lyrics I like

When we met, it was in the hot green jungle
Your perfect flesh impervious to anything fungal

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Stupid band names

I’m really getting sick of bands who mispell their own name, or the names of their albums and songs, for some kind of cool-value. You know the kind of thing – Reprazent, M!ssundaztood , sk8er boi, Outkast, A Skillz and Krafty Kuts, Bushwacka, Klashnekoff. It’s cheesy and just so twencen. But the habit has reached a new low with one of the bands on X Factor, who are called Addictiv Ladies. For fuck’s sake, you’re not even trying. If ‘Addictive Ladies’ is too mainstream for you, how about ‘Adiktiv Laydeez’ or ‘Adicktiv Lay Ds’? Just dropping the ‘e’ seems so … half-hearted.

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Pandora.com

A few posts ago I mentioned that I was trying a personalised internet streaming service called last.fm, which uses a combination of tags and people’s preferences to find music it thinks you will like. I decided it was a bit crap because when I asked for music similar to Marvin Gaye, it suggested De La Soul, N*E*R*D and Willie Nelson.

Well, I may have the answer – Pandora. They’ve classified all their music according to its musical qualities and use that information to choose songs for you. To use the same example, if I ask for music similar to Marvin Gaye, first it gives me a Marvin Gaye song, then the next is ‘Easy’ by The Commodores, and if you ask why it chose the song, it says:

Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features classic soul qualities, mild rhythmic syncopation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, string section beds and major key tonality

Then ‘I’m Stone in Love with You’ by The Stylistics, ‘I Wish it would Rain’ by the Temptations, and so on. In other words, it’s quite nuanced and accurate.

You can make it even more precise by choosing an individual song to make selections based on. I’ve noticed a few gaps in the collection already – no Twinkle Brothers! No Will Young! presumably both because it’s a labour-intensive process adding new music and perhaps because it’s a bit US-centric. At the moment I’m using the 10-hour free trial, but I’m sorely tempted to sign up when that runs out. It costs $12 for 3 months or $36 for a year, and it’s Flash-based, just running through your browser.