The Future...

What's in store for the future of popular music? No one really knows. Will the fads continue to repeat? (We all know that MGMT's "Electric Feel" could easily be a disco song!) Are we in for something completely different? Or are computers taking over the world? A recent iPod/iPhone application mentioned in FILTER's blog, makes me wonder. We already have beat machines, but now lyric machines?! Crazy, right? I doubt any true musicians will get so lazy in the future, but it is a little scary when you think about it...

As for the industry, I really can't predict the future for them either. What I can say is that I think the RIAA will lose their fight against P2P services. These lawsuits are turning away the few customers they have; technology is advancing more quickly than any of us can imagine, and soon we will all move on to the next thing! They should look for more creative ways to make a profit rather than continue to fight (and lose money) on P2P and other forms of illegal downloading. Those are my thoughts...Tell me what you think.

Vinyl is Forever

April 18th was National Record Store Day, and it got me thinking. If vinyl no longer existed, would there still be the same demand for record stores that there is today? No doubt, it is a small demand, but still, would there be as many people looking for that rare 1997 Chumbawumba Tubthumber CD as there are people looking for that first edition 1972 David Bowie Ziggy Stardust LP on vinyl? I think not.

Why is vinyl still in demand? Now, I think that I prefer vinyl for the same reasons everyone else who buys vinyl does (and I'll admit some of them are shallow): it sounds better than anything else, looks cool (especially in a frame in your bedroom), and is kind of a collectors item. It's something physical that you can hold on to touch, play with. Anyone can download an mp3 and have a huge iTunes library, but few can boast an impressive vinyl collection. CD's are great and everything, but records are just so much more. A vinyl record forces you to listen to the whole album, it makes you appreciate music in the way the artist intended you to, which I think is great, and a lost art form in itself (see earlier post).

So celebrate National Record Store day a little late, go buy a vinyl record, or dust off your mom's copy of Joni Mitchell's Blue or any other vinyl she might have and listen to it in the way it was intended to be listened to.

Heidi and Spencer killed the Video Star??

I watched this funny/sad video the other day about the downfall of MTV, and well it kind of got me thinking....if MTV (which was invented in...what the 80's?) is all corrupt and not really about music anymore, but money, where does that leave the music industry? Is it even about the music anymore? 360 deals are already trying to take over the world. I can't take most of the mainstream acts seriously these days, I mean, Britney Spears?? Did she even sing on her last record?! And don't even get me started on Kanye's new energy drink... Maybe I'm just in a despondent mood or something, but it makes me kind of sad. Music is such a pure thing that everyone can enjoy, why do we have to ruin it with so many ads and reality shows? Give me Radiohead over Kanye any day.

You Make Me Wanna Lala...

Sorry to use such a terrible, terrible song title as a post title, but I couldn't resist!

I have finally found a tool, that I think you will find much more useful than Musipedia, it is....wait for it....lala! That's right, it's actually called Lala. Lala is a sort of variation/rip-off of my beloved last.fm, it's a music website/sort of database you may say combined with social networking. It's a bit different from last.fm in the sense that you have a web library of music accessible from any computer which is pretty cool. You also start out with 50 free song credits for your web library, and any web purchases after that are only 10 cents. Full mp3s cost 89 cents, but if you already purchased them for your web library they cost 79 cents. But let's be real, this is cheap and all...but does anyone really pay for music anymore? If I'm gonna buy music it will either be on Vinyl, in CD form, or from the iTunes Store if I have a gift card.

One thing that is a little frustrating about Lala is that it is hard to find other users or see how many people are using the service. A great feature for this site would be some sort of music compatibility scale based on taste or songs listened to, so that users could connect with each other and recommend music to one another. Hopefully future versions will remedy this problem.

Lala gets pretty decent reviews, PC mag has a pretty good one that you can read here. But it has yet to catch on as much as Pandora or last.fm. In order to get the full effect of Lala, I signed up for an account. It was pretty easy, and after you sign up you can download an application to "upload" your existing library (mine was iTunes) called the Lala music mover. The music mover looks up songs in your library that also exist in their vast online library (over 6 million songs) and uploads them into your Lala "collection" and they work the same way that any other web song you could buy with your credits would. It's pretty cool, but not without it's faults. I have over 10 thousand songs in my iTunes library, so it estimated about 10 hours over uploading. I left it to upload over night, but it errored after about 7,000 or so songs and I'm too lazy to upload the remaining 3,000...

But access to 7,000 streaming songs online (and all of my iTunes playlists) is pretty cool! It's really convenient because my library is stored on my external hard drive, which I obviously cannot carry around with me all the time, so when I'm at work or outside on my laptop, I can still listen to my music! Also loading songs takes seconds! And you can make a sort of Netflix queue of the songs you want to listen to, which is really awesome.

Anyone who likes to listen to music can use this tool, it's super easy to use and convenient. I might even keep my account for a while!

Musipedia - Useful for you?

In my last post, I talked about the basics of Musipedia, but I didn't really confirm whether or not it is a useful tool for you, my beloved readers. When I started this blog, the typical reader was described as someone who was interested in the music industry, someone who wants to get into the business, or maybe someone who just casually reads pitchfork and stereogum every day like me (see my blog list to the right). The typical reader is also someone who enjoys listening to music on a daily basis, goes to show, buys albums, etc... Because if you didn't have some sort of interest in music, why would you even bother to look at my blog?!

For me Musipedia, was an interesting tool, but not super useful for me in any way, and I assume it serves the same function for you. However, if you also happen to be a musician, it could be incredibly useful! It all depends on you hobbies/interests. It really doesn't help me in any way, not even as a time waster, since I can't really use it correctly (sad, I know)!

If you would like a little more information on Musipedia, Wikipedia has a good entry on it. For now, I'm going to look for a better tool to suit all of us...maybe last.fm or songza. I could probably do a 7 part editorial on last.fm, since I'm pretty much obsessed with it! To hold you over, check out some of these other music databases on this list, some of them are quite good!

Tooly Tools

I just discovered something super-awesome, it's called Musipedia and it is not only a music encyclopedia, but soooo much more.

Have you ever had a melody to a song stuck in your head, but couldn't figure out what song or who sang it? I have, it pretty much happens ALL the time. A lot of the time it's unpleasant, you feel like an idiot or a victim of advertising and corporate America... I once had Flo Rida's "Low" stuck in my head for a month, it was awful... but that's story for another time...

Anyway, have you ever wondered if there was a way to find out just what the name or artist of that song was? Well, today is your lucky day because Musipedia has a service, or tool, or widget, or twidget (wait, would that be a twitter widget?) Anyway...there are five different ways you can find out your song, ranging from tools for the people who actually know musical theory and stuff....to those who like to just bang it out on a keyboard like me!

Musipedia uses Melodyhound for this service, and on it you can use a digital keyboard to play the melody, sing or whistle it into your computer, use the melodic contour (parsons code) (I still don't understand what this is), or tap the rhythm into your computer.

Before writing about it, I decided to check out Melodyhound for myself. My experience was not as amazing as I thought it would be. First I tried the rhythm search, but I soon found out I had no rhythm! Not one of the tunes I was tapping into the keyboard was coming up as a result! I would tap the rhythm to "Smoke on the Water" and the computer would think I was tapping out some Mozart song! I wouldn't dare try the piano keyboard, contour, or draw note search, since I know nothing about music theory, but I did try humming the tune into my laptop's microphone (you can also whistle, but I cannot). That turned out even worse than the tapping! I tried to hum one of my favorite songs by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Maps" (the tune was simple enough), but it turned out that my humming also sounded like a number of classical songs and Bruce Springstein?!

Maybe I should just stick to listening to music, and leave the theory to the professionals...
It would be cool to have an application for people like me who don't know anything about making music, but would like to be able to hum the tune of a song that has been stuck in their head for weeks and find out the title/artist. I am sure it is only a matter of time until this sort of thing is possible.

Even though it didn't work for me I think this application would work for musicians and composers and could be very useful for their sort of work; it's like the google of melody searches!

Is this as useful a tool as easybib, maybe not (depending on who you are). But you have to admit that it is pretty interesting, and if you know a lot about music theory then this just may be the tool for you!