This past weekend I ventured into the deep south, New Orleans to be exact.
While there, I explored its culture and saw its sights. I was shocked and amazed at the amount of music there, and how much art was part of everyday life in the city.
Nashville, which is affectionately called “music city,” is comparatively a dead scene. New Orleans “has it,” and has it everywhere. Sure, all the one-way streets might make it hard to get around, but the entertainment is worth it. Continue reading
For anyone who read my Top 10 albums for 2011 post, you should be aware of how depressing I feel 2011 was.
I felt that all the indie bands were trying to outdo each other on how slow, lazy, and uninspiring they could be. Almost half of the bands on my list were what I call “snowy day” bands. Even music inspired by dance punk stopped being danceable. What happened? Did we all eat too much turkey in 2010 and become lethargic for the rest of the year? Continue reading
I’ve always found New Wave and Punk sort of interesting. I wasn’t old enough to remember when this type of music was fresh, so now that I’m older it’s fun to hear the kind of music adults were listening to in the decade I was born.
American New Wave is generally kind of oddball, but Japanese New Wave is its own special brand. Some of it is far more electronic than rock influenced, and I have a feeling most of it was made on Amigas but don’t quote me on that. Continue reading
I’ve had a growing fascination with older Japanese music over the last couple years. Up until recently, I had only listened to acts like Zard. Even then, I only heard their newer contributions.
I came across a video from Rebecca, whose YouTube description was “wacky 80s Japanese video.” As a fan of Japanese music since 2001, I highly doubted that anything would put a twitch in my eye.
It wasn’t the strangest music I’ve ever encountered, but it opened a door. I found out about a website called Idollica that documents a large number of Silver Age Jpop. As I perused the site, I kept thinking to myself: “I had no idea these bands existed!” Continue reading
There has been some debate as to whether the chiptunes genre is any good.
The raver kids despise it. The gamer dorks adore it. Some say it’s boring, while some say it captures the essence of retro video games, giving new life to their sound cards.
Chiptunes is a style of music in which sounds are created by using retro video game sound chips. Hence, the chip in chiptunes.
Like any genre, samples can span across the board. Nobody is going to like every song from a band, but chiptunes is geared towards electronic music fans of any ilk. It is also an approach, beyond being a genre of music. This makes it a flexible genre, able to be used to multiple purposes.
As such, there is chiptunes music available for both the raver kids and the video game fans. Continue reading
Since the early 1890s we’ve had something physical to listen to music on. Starting with wax cylinders, we’ve progressed to reels, vinyl, cassettes, 8-tracks, compact discs and eventually digital players and the digital format popularized in part by MP3.
I recall the days of Napster and Kazaa striking fear and curiosity into the public mindset. It seemed like everyone thought that digital files were going to change the music industry, and I’d argue that it did. The industry adapted with services like iTunes and Rhapsody.
Physical CD sales have been on the decline, and we’ve been seeing more services that offer digital downloads of our favorite music at competitive prices. Cloud services like iTunes and Amazon let us control and listen to our music almost anywhere we choose. However, physical files may also be going the way of compact discs. Continue reading
I have been using what may be considered “social music” since 2004. I started out with audioscrobbler, and tried a few of the other streaming sites as well. Places like grooveshark and Pandora have had their places in our Internet zeitgeist, but it seems Spotify is taking over rapidly.
Spotify has been available overseas for some time, but only recently was opened to United States users. Since then, I’ve been seeing it pop up more and more on Facebook and in magazines. From what I can tell, it’s quickly replacing the other streaming sites as the de facto music service.
You can’t buy music from it, but you can get links to sites where you can. The program acts as a streaming service and as an iTunes replacement. You can use it on mobile devices. Spotify also offers subscription services that allow you to edit playlists and get rid of advertisements. Continue reading
Lately, I’ve noticed that a fair number of pop artists have significantly changed their styles over the last decade and a half. I will document this for you with a barrage of videos that demonstrate just what I’m talking about. Continue reading
In a comment to my blog post about Prince yesterday, reader dekh mentioned that artists whose copyrighted work (e.g., their music videos) appears on YouTube don’t receive royalties from it.
Dekh also brought up the point that a Rick Astley video has been viewed over 46 million times on YouTube, and questions whether the publicity received thereby is sufficient compensation when YouTube is gaining significant profit in ads run on YouTube, with little if any of the proceeds going to the artist. I’m not sure the Rick Astley video is a good example to use here; probably more people have watched the Rick Astley video as the result of a prank than by pure choice. Check out this article about Rickrolling.
Nevertheless, regardless of how people find themselves on the YouTube site watching a video, it’s still a valid point that artists don’t receive any revenues for their work being displayed on YouTube. However, YouTube can’t police every person who uploads a video to YouTube, and there are valid reasons to allow people to upload their own intellectual property to YouTube if they so desire. The problem is that not everyone, including Prince, wants their music on YouTube. Prince’s reasons are his own, but he’s allowed to have whatever reasons he wants; his intellectual property is his property. The question is how to stop third parties from uploading content for which they do not have the right to do so. Continue reading