Music - Cynthia McCune on Diigo

17 Nov 09

The Decade's 50 Most Important Recordings : NPR

Oh boy ... more to explore!

02 Nov 09

Editorial Notebook - Memphis - NYTimes.com

If I had to name the best short story in the form of a song lyric, I suspect the winner would be Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee”

link to song for rnr class blog post

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music rock 'n' roll rocknroll lyrics nytimes

22 Oct 09

The Song Decoders at Pandora - NYTimes.com

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Music Pandora taste

12 Aug 09

What Is Your Favorite Song From Woodstock? - NYTimes.com

A good overview of Woodstock classics ... but they left out CSN&Y

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Music woodstock rocknroll

02 Aug 09

Swan Songs? - NYTimes.com

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Music digital

since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half.
This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They’re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.

27 Jul 09

Social Music: Top 5 Music Recommendation Services

Find new music

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music social media socialsoftware

21 Jul 09

1969 - The New York Times

Led Zepplin, CCR, the Beatles, John & Yoko, Woodstock, Altamont -- musical landmarks in a notable year, marking the beginning of the modern era.

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music culture

29 Apr 09

David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music

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music wired

02 Apr 09

Music in Multimedia: Add Sparingly, Not as a Crutch - Poynter Online

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journalism multimedia music poynter

Documentaries and television journalists do it all time.

But should we?
Music has power, and within a multimedia story, it has the power to hide a lot of flaws: to make a story move faster, to set an emotional tone for a piece.
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- Music is a pervasive part of our culture. It's used in documentaries, movies and television shows, and journalism producers should be able to employ all the same tools in their multimedia.
- As an experiment, I edited a story three different ways: using natural sound only, adding a music track in a minor key and adding an upbeat music track. Everything else about the stories is identical. Watch for yourself, and see if the music makes a difference in how you react.
- the BBC has decided against using music in news stories
- Music works best, he said, when the photojournalism carries the storyline and contains the narrative, not because narrative is missing.
- a musical score is often the go-to tool for editors who "can't think of another way to make strong bridges between scenes or otherwise choreograph appropriate story movement
- Most movies use music the way athletes use steroids.
- your standards for adding music may vary within story genres
- The more serious or sensitive the story, the more careful you should be in using background music.
- the moment that you take music out, it shines a spotlight on whatever comes next. If you really want people to pay attention, you stop the music right before that. In audio we have two tools: sound and silence. To use music all the time, you've wiped out the chance to use silence."

01 Apr 09

Dan Kennedy's Rocky Times in the Music Biz : NPR Music

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music rocknroll business model

The Music Industry, Adapting to a Digital Future : NPR Music

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music web digital future

Writer Eliot Van Buskirk joins Fresh Air to discuss the new, digital landscape of music, and the resulting changes in the music industry.

20 Mar 09

Six-Word Reviews of 1,302 SXSW Mp3s by Paul Ford - The Morning News

Nice use of Google Spreadsheet, as well as links to new music

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music googletools

13 Mar 09

Daniel Sinker: Where is Our Orchestra? What Journalism Can Learn From the Mind-Blowing Remixes of Kutiman

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music web youtube mashup journalism

need to look at this stuff not as competition or story fodder, but instead see it through the eyes of Kutiman: it is an endless supply of raw goods, ready to be remixed, rebuilt, and recreated in ways that are wholly new and wholly unexpected. At the end of the day, that's what journalism has always been best at: taking the world around us and giving it back to us in new ways. Well, that world has suddenly become much easier to access -- it's telling us about itself all the time. But that doesn't mean that the stories it tells are enough
Right now, some journalists look at the wealth of material on the web as a threat -- they see all these amateur voices and worry that they will overpower their own (hence the many, many, many stories about how "bloggers can't replace reporters"). Others look at it and see what journalists always see: story ideas. Hence all the stories you've had to slog through about Twitter this last month. Both are wrong.
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- Journalists need to not simply reach in, but dive in headfirst. We need to build our own orchestras out of the information being created all around us. Be like Kutiman: use the millions of blog entries, photos, tweets, and videos that find themselves on the web every day to build something new.
- What can we do with it? Kutiman gives a simple, elegant answer: anything. It's a river, just reach in.
- "If your reaction to this crate of magic is 'Hm. I wonder how we'd go about suing someone who 'did this' with our IP?' instead of, 'Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,' it's probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page."
- Kutiman, an Israeli musician, cuts his songs together using snippets of performances on hundreds of YouTube videos.
- Kutiman, an Israeli musician, cuts his songs together using snippets of performances on hundreds of YouTube videos.
- Kutiman, an Israeli musician, cuts his songs together using snippets of performances on hundreds of YouTube videos.
- a win for anyone who's thought about just what it is we can do exactly with this explosion of self-expression the internet has engendered

05 Mar 09

U.K. University Offers MA In Beatles - CBS News

My next degree?

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beatles rocknroll university music culture

Brocken said students would be expected to study the Beatles' songs, stardom, hometown and cultural impact through four 12-week courses and a dissertation.
Liverpool Hope University said Tuesday that its new master's program, "The Beatles, Popular Music and Society," would give students the opportunity to analyze music and culture through the band's work.
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- a local university says it rolling out a graduate program entirely devoted to the Fab Four.

03 Mar 09

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | U2 play surprise rooftop concert

Emulating the Beatles

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u2 Beatles rocknroll music

Rock band U2 have played a surprise gig on top of BBC Broadcasting House, in central London.
The performance was also broadcast live on DJ Chris Evans' BBC Radio 2 show.
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- U2's impromptu gig echoed The Beatles' 1969 rooftop performance at record label Apple's London headquarters.

24 Feb 09

Music + Twitter = Love : Dork Muffin

Sharing the music you love via Twitter

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music twitter share socialmedia

Another cool site for Last.fm and Twitter is LastFMTweetLove. Here you can enter your Twitter and Last.fm information and every time you “love” a song on Last.fm, it will tweet it to your profile.
you can set up your Twitter account under Blip.fm’s settings tab and whenever you “blip” a song, it will tweet to your profile. Plus, since this is a social service, you can enter a message that will be included with the link to the song.
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- Once you’ve found the song you want to share, you select it and it automatically creates a tinyurl of the song link and auto-copies it to your clipboard which you can then tweet and when someone clicks on it, it will play the song on Grooveshark.
- Speaking of Grooveshark, they made a cool site where you can log into your Twitter account and listen to music that people are sharing through Twitter. Their tagline sums it up: “Twisten.fm crawls Twitter for tweets about music. Then you listen to them.”
- Song.ly is another very cool, yet simple site to share music on Twitter.
- you can actually upload songs that you can’t find on other music databases and then tweet them.
- Songza.com is a pretty nifty music site that allows you to search for a song or artist. When it pulls the results, you can click on the song you want and it gives you the option to share. Once you hover over “share”, you will see “Twitter This”
- if you use Last.fm and Twitter, why not integrate them? You can add your latest tweets to your Last.fm sidebar or you can use Twitterfeed and feed your last played songs into your profile. Just visit Twitterfeed, set up the account, and grab the RSS feed from your Last.fm page and select how often and how many songs you want to feed from your recent activity.

11 Feb 09

Travel to Liverpool - Beatles Magical Mystery Tour - Video Episode 45 | The Amateur Traveler Travel Podcast - best places to travel

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music rocknroll amateur traveler

04 Feb 09

The Day the Music Died: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

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music rocknroll

02 Feb 09

Despite Accord With Apple, Music Labels Still Fret - NYTimes.com

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music DRM iTunes

according to one music industry executive involved in the negotiations, Apple’s primary goal was securing distribution of music over its iPhone, as mobile phones are expected to become an increasingly important outlet for music.
The labels do not have much leverage in negotiating with Apple.
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- “I think Steve has been smart, and he knows he has the upper hand,” said Dave Goldberg, the former general manager of Yahoo Music who is now an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. “They can’t afford to pull their music.”
- Many executives say they believe the future of music buying is over the mobile phone, not from buying individual songs but by paying a monthly subscription fee to hear vast database of music.
- Apple indicated it was willing to make the switch to variable pricing provided that the music companies — which negotiate individually with Apple to avoid colluding — would agree to license songs for wireless downloads on the iPhone, as well as drop copyright protections using digital rights management, or D.R.M., software.
- Apple indicated it was willing to make the switch to variable pricing provided that the music companies — which negotiate individually with Apple to avoid colluding — would agree to license songs for wireless downloads on the iPhone, as well as drop copyright protections using digital rights management, or D.R.M., software.
- Even if Mr. Jobs does not get personally involved in future negotiations, music executives still fear dealing with Apple. One chit the company holds is the power of the iTunes home page, where it promotes music. They also say that the entire Apple staff, including Eddie Cue, the vice president in charge of iTunes who handles the relationships with the record labels, do their best to follow Mr. Jobs’s style in their own negotiating.
- “Whether the industry likes it or not, the iTunes chart showing the most popular songs in America is a major influencer of how kids today discover and communicate with their friends what kind of music they like,” said Charlie Walk, the former president of Epic Records, a unit of Sony Music. “It’s a very powerful thing right now in American pop culture and immediately validates a hit song.”

28 Jan 09

Bruce Springsteen, "Working on a Dream" | Salon Arts & Entertainment

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springsteen music rocknroll

What makes Springsteen's popular success all the more astonishing is his bleakness. At its most searing, his work probes the underside of the American dream -- its elusiveness for everyday Americans, the price we pay for chasing it, even the need to escape it altogether in order to survive. By offering up the American promise as a lie, Springsteen belongs alongside such diverse writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison, all of whom have probed the darkness of the American condition.
His 16th studio album is titled "Working on a Dream," and in the context of Obama's inauguration and Springsteen's performance at the Lincoln Memorial, it is impossible not to think about the best-known use of the word in American history: Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
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- Springsteen's art lies in a deception, a tension between the verse lyrics and the chorus. He sings to our heads, but rocks to our hearts. In the verses, he explains, he sings the blues. But the chorus is gospel. And so we shout, "Born in the USA," fists pumping in celebration, yet the lyrics ("born in a dead man's town") depict a defeated patriotism.
- Musically, the best songs feature orchestral walls of sound and clever hooks. Echoes of a dozen groups and riffs from the 1960s, especially the Beatles, Byrds and Beach Boys, can be heard here, and for good measure Springsteen throws in some folk, blues and soul. But lyrically the songs are no joyous romp. There is very little happiness here.
- Springsteen's message on "Working on a Dream" seems to be that the answer is love. He knows the Beatles delivered the news more than 40 years ago, which is perhaps why so many of the song titles on the new album evoke the Fab Four: "Tomorrow Never Knows," "This Life," "Life Itself" and "Surprise, Surprise." (Recall that John Lennon whistles at the end of "The Two of Us," a song about a relationship and going home.) Half of the new songs have the word "love" in them. And the others include lines such as "with you I have been blessed" and "you're mine for always."
- Bruce has returned to an original faith in rock 'n' roll as the music of liberation. He once observed that Elvis freed our bodies and Dylan freed our minds. Springsteen is working on our souls.
- The saving grace of rock 'n' roll will not revolutionize society, and it certainly will not deliver the American dream, but it has changed many a person's life. Springsteen knows this because he is one of the saved. He got religion after seeing Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show in 1957, and he got his first electric guitar after seeing the Beatles on the show in 1964.
- Springsteen's music can make us feel alive, but it cannot save the country or restore the American dream. That part is up to us.

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