Business Evolutionist

My Muxtape

I'm still here... just been busy.

Here is some music for you... to apologize for the long absence: my muxtape

I did create a twitter account and have been posting to that....

Pete Yorn was great!

I went to see Pete Yorn at the Chameleon Club in Lancaster, PA. last night - the show was great!

He did many of my favorite songs, including 'Life on a Chain', 'Strange Condition', 'Crystal Village' and even played a great Smiths cover during the encore: 'There is a light that never goes out'.

I spent the whole day listening to Pete Yorn yesterday, getting ready for the show. His first CD - musicforthemorningafter - is still my favorite. Even better is the musicforthemorningafter with Bonus CD featuring 5 cover songs!

If you'd like to hear what he sounds like live, check out the double CD: Live From New Jersey.

Again, great show! I highly suggest seeing him if you get a chance!

What are you listening to??

My friend Chris sent me an email this morning:

I need some new songs. Any recommendations? Here are five that I put on my latest mix cd. Can you recommend five of your favorites?

Cat Empire – Sly
Damien Rice – 9 Crimes
Pete Yorn – Life on a Chain
Tori Amos – Big Wheel
Polyphonic Spree – light and day

My reply:

Hmmm... 5 current faves... lets see...

Travis - Selfish Jean
Phoenix - Too Young
Wilco - ELT
The Doves - Almost Forgot Myself
Editors - All Sparks

So, how about you? What are 5 of your favorite songs right now??

Morrissey was great!

We went to see Morrissey last night at Wolf Trap in Virgina - what a show!

He played a ton of solo stuff, some old Smiths songs and he sounded fantastic! What an incredible singer.

I highly suggest going to see him (tour info on myspace) if you get a chance!

This begins a summer of some great shows... The Fixx, The Psychedelic Furs, Lovedrug, and, possibly Muse again in August (plus a few others).

Wolfgang's Vault

I'm sure you've heard of this by now, but just in case... Wolfgang's Vault is the company that owns and markets the archives of the late Bill Graham (the ultimate rock promoter). They've just opened the Concert Vault - which features 300 full concerts, all of which are 100% free to stream!!

A sampling of the available concerts: David Bowie at Nassau Coliseum in 1976, The Cure at the Ontario Theatre in 1984, Elvis Costello at the Philly Spectrum in 1984, and Hendrix at Winterland in 1968.

A quick check on the forums gives the following little tidbit:

In the next 60 days we will add new functionality to the Concert Vault. For example, listeners will soon be able to create and share their own playlists from our live performances. In the next 90 to 120 days we intend to offer full-concert downloads and, in 180 days we will present never-before-seen live performance video from the thousands of concert videos we have in our archive.

Check out Concert Vault.

Enjoy!

(h/t to Very Short List - if you're not a subscriber, you should sign up today!)

Lovedrug

I've been listening to Lovedrug, 'Pretend You're Alive' nonstop for the last 5 days... what a great CD!

They sort of remind me of Keane, but heavier and not as polished/produced.

Check out Blackout and Spiders (in MP3).

My favorite songs on the CD are Rocknroll and Pandamoranda...

It is just a great CD! (link to CD on Amazon).

iPod vs. PDA

My music collection now stands at about 60 gigs, about 35 gigs of that is on my 40 gig iPod. I end up shuffling most of the time because I can't decide what to listen to (the paradox of music choice?).

Over the last couple of months, I haven't been listening to my iPod as much... taking the place of the eclectic collection of music on my iPod is my PDA (HP iPaq hx4715) loaded with PocketMusic and a 6 gig microdrive. I still end up shuffling most of the time on PDA, however, it is rare that I ever hit "next". Having the reduced capacity forces me to be very selective in what I load. So, instead of copying all the tracks from a CD, I'm only loading my favorite songs. I have included all the songs from a few CDs - like Welcome to the North (The Music), Appetite for Destruction (Guns & Roses), Absolution (Muse), In Love & Death (The Used), Hot Fuss (The Killers), etc.

There are some other advantages to using the PDA over the iPod...

• Wi-fi! Enough said.


• I can watch DVD's - there is a great program called PocketDVD that allows you to rip a DVD. This is just awesome! You can watch the movies on your PDA or on your computer. I have also ripped several of my favorite episodes of The West Wing (for short flights).


• MS Office Mobile - I've written more than a few documents on this, and it's been nice in meetings as a note taking device.


• PDF viewer... the reading experience isn't great, but certainly good enough. I wouldn't want to read War & Peace on it or anything, however, between Mobile Word and the PDF viewer I'm able to read anytime; anywhere and everywhere.


• Voice recorder... I haven't used this much yet because I have a nice sony digital recorder (for doing interviews), but I'm about to try it out.


• Speaker... okay, the speaker doesn't have the best sound quality, however, I use it on occasion and it's been nice. It works really well for podcasts, where it is mostly just voice.


• Games... freecell and chess are the two that I play most often ("often" being a relative term, I don't find I really get that much time for playing games)


• Expandability... I've got the 6 gig microdrive with music, a 2 gig card with movies on it, and a 1gig SD card with documents on it. I also have a backup battery and one of those QWERTY thumb/keyboards (still getting used to this).


• Mobile Skype... I haven't tried this yet... but how cool, huh?


• Calendar, Contacts, Tasks... I don't use these really. I'm never far from my computer and have only taken one trip where I didn't carry my laptop, even with syncing, this just doesn't add much value for me.

To be fair there are some downsides to it. It isn't the same great user experience as the iPod when it comes to music and the microdrive really chews up the battery.

I haven't gotten rid of my iPod just yet, however I'm starting to use it less and less each week.

What do you think? Do you carry both a PDA and MP3 player? If you have a PDA, how do you use it most?

How do you find new music?

It seems that there are a growing number of music sites online that are geared towards helping people discover new artists that they like. This space really interests me, as a music lover.

I've spent a bit of time over the last week or so checking these sites out and I've come to the conclusion that none really work for me... I've just started looking, so I could be wrong... and if you use any of these sites, please add to the discussion! I'd love to find a site that really helps me discover new artists!

So, the sites that I've checked are:

1.) Pandora - which you "seed" by entering an artist and then it begins playing other artists that their experts have determined to have a similar sound. To test, I entered Muse. It started by playing a muse song, New Born and then played the following songs:

• MrNorth - My Love
  
• Feeder - Pushing the Senses
  
• Sugarcult - Shaking
  
• Hot Hot Heat - Dirty Mouth (I own this one)
  
• Elefant - It's a shame
  

It stopped at Elefant and asked me to register, which I didn't. Uh, I debated though...

I'd only heard Hot Hot Heat before (I'd heard of Sugarcult, but never heard them)... the music was pretty good, I just don't think that site will work for me full time so I didn't want to sign up. Pandora really equates to a customized radio station that is refined over time based on the ratings you give the songs that it plays. This reminds me of Yahoo Music, which I used years ago (I've already have 355 ratings) it could be better, who knows.

Overall I kind of liked Pandora, not sure that I'll use it though. It requires me to be at the computer, which is a drawback for me (my employer blocks audio and video) and it, like Yahoo, requires participation (rating).I think it lacked community as well... which is something I'll address in a bit.

2.) Hype Machine - my first impression was that this is a cool idea, they scour the blogosphere looking at the tracks people are talking about so you don't have to. It is simply a great site for discovering up and coming artists/tracks... and I even found a couple of cool cover tunes by Muse that I didn't know existed! Another cool feature of this site was, like Pandora, you actually get to hear the full songs! This site is cool and I've added the feed to bloglines, so I'll be checking this one quite frequently.

3.) Last.fm - I heard about this site about a year ago and I think it has some nice aspects to it; it is heavy on taste-based discovery and seems to have pretty cool social networking aspects... there is just one drawback for me: you have to download a plug-in. The download monitors what you listen to on your computers MP3 player (WinAmp, iTunes, etc) and uploads that data to Last.fm. You can see what other people are listening to and the whole thing looks really cool... the bad part for me, I don't listen to music on my computer, I listen to music on my iPod... I'm not sure their software will grab my data when I hook up my iPod to my computer (only about once a week). The other sort of strange thing is that I use shuffle, and know a lot of other people do as well, so my iPod might play songs that I like, but wouldn't consider to be my favorites. The logical question with that one is, then why is it on your iPod? I'll give you some examples, I have some classical music, some jazz, and some blues - not a ton, but enough that when the mood strikes I have something from that genre to listen to. I'm have some Bach, Mozart and Chopin - I don't see myself buying much more of that.

Pandora and Last.fm are both trying to solve the same problem (IMHO) - helping people discover new artists that they'll like. Hype Machine is sort of doing the same thing, in a way, I guess they figure it's a wisdom of crowds thing - if enough people are blogging a song then it must be good.

About a year ago, I had an idea for a site like these and I sent out an email to a dozen folks I knew loved music. The email went like this:

I'm doing a research project and was wondering if you would mind answering three (hopefully) quick questions?

1.) How do you find new music? (Friends, Radio, Other - please specify)

2.) Where do you buy most of your music? (iTunes, Amazon, Other - please specify)

3.) What are your favorite songs (please list between 10 and 20 - Song Title, Artist).
e.g. Comfortably Numb, Pink Floyd

Thank you in advance for helping!! Feel free to blog your favorite songs (just send me the link) and also to forward these questions to your music loving friends!

Okay, I totally primed my focus group by providing answers... DOH! ;-) But the responses I got back were relly good, including plenty of unexpected answers. Some people used online sources, some used magazines, and of course several people cited the recommendations of friends. This is the one that I think makes the most sense, because what it really comes down to is affinity. The knowledge or reputation of the person making the recommendation. This, of course, is nothing new, and what Last.fm is probably the best at of the few services I've looked at - they are trying to help people connect through music.

The one site that I didn't mention is Amazon, which I've bought a lot of music from and rated more than a few artists on. Their approach seems more to be 'wisdom of crowds'; "people who bought x also bought y"... I could be wrong on that, but that is my perception.

I think in the end it comes down to two critical factors: first is affinity or correlation, it isn't enough to know that we both like Muse. I want to know that you like Muse and Candlebox and Kasabian and Pete Yorn and Fleetwood Mac and The Smiths [and etc.]. If we both like 5 or 6 of the same artists, now I have a higher trust level that I might enjoy what you're listening to. The second, as I mentioned, is reputation. My friend Billy turned me on to Kasabian, Travis, The Music, and countless others. I totally trust him. If he suggests something, chances are I'll like it.

My idea a year ago was to create a little site that allowed people to specify their favorite 10 or 15 songs and then a basic correlation algorithm would try to match people up, sort of a playlist connector, if you will. I got the basic algorithm working, but there were several flaws with my idea... you had to go to the site and enter in a bunch of data (I did figure out a way to make that easy), I didn't have any way to let people hear samples of the music, it required people to visit the site (it could send people emails, I suppose, but how often?), and the biggest hurdle in my mind was getting people to actually use and share the site - you already talk with your friends, so why the extra friction of putting a site in between those conversations? I thought about exposing it as a little widget people could put on their blog, but I'm not sure that would really work either... obviously I can't seem to let go of the idea. DOH! ;-)

Okay, I've rambled enough here... obviously this is a subject that I have more than a passing interest in.

I'd love to hear from you - how do you discover new music? Are you using one of these online sites? If so, what do you think? Does last.fm pick up what I listened to on my iPod?

Muse was GREAT!

I went to see Muse last night in Philadelphia (sadly, no fuzzy pictures from my cell phone).

In a word, the show was UNBELIEVABLE. They were fantastic and they played several of my favorite songs: Feeling Good (Nina Simone cover), Plug In Baby, Time is Running Out, and Supermassive Black Hole (off their latest CD). Okay, I love all their songs - those are just a few of my real favorites.

If you haven't heard Muse, what are you waiting for? My suggestion is to start with Absolution, start to finish it's a great record.

If you get a chance to see them live, don't pass it up!

Used CD's vs. iTunes

I don't buy digital music. I have iTunes installed for my iPod, but have not purchased a single song from the iTunes store. I love the idea, love Apples's implementation, but I still won't buy music that way.

I've been buying used CD's for a couple of years now, mostly from a local store that always has a great selection. But over the last year or so I've been buying more and more used cd's online, and so far it's been great.

So, as a service to readers, I thought I post a little comparison chart of the major differences between online and used...

	Used	iTunes	Winner
Selection	I've been able to get CD's that are out of print	Huge, but limited by record companies	Used
Quality of music	I can rip the CD to MP3 in any bitrate I want, typically 192	128 it seems is the norm for online services	Used
Freedom	The CD's are mine. If anything happens to my MP3's, I can just rip the CD again	Locked in with Apple format (AAC)	Used
Delivery	Most have been delivered w/in a week or so	Immediate	iTunes
Cost	$5.00 or less for a whole CD. My average cost for the last 10 has been about $4.00	$0.99 cents a song or $9.99 for a full record	Used
The winner for me?			Used

I'm not picking on iTunes here. Because I have an iPod, I'm limited to which digital music stores I can use. I don't care for the DRM that any of these services have. They limit my choices for playing the music back. This became even more important when I recently had to install a new car stereo and I chose one that could play CD's with MP3's.

What do you think? Are you buying music through a digital service? If so, what am I missing?