Crosby, Stills & Nash 1969 Video Footage

I enjoy listening to great musicians talk about their craft. Here’s some interesting footage of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Good stuff.

Is Pandora One the One?

I’ve been a fairly consistent user of Pandora since I first read about it on December 30, 2005 (ain’t it great the way your blog becomes your personal archive of thoughts, both good and bad?). I have several Pandora stations, a couple of which are over three years old. In that time, I have finely tuned my likes and dislikes and, generally speaking, the Pandora algorithm knows what I like. And given that my music preferences are broad in some ways and narrow in others, that’s no mean feat.

The thing that allowed Pandora to map my musical genome is the thing that distinguishes Pandora from much of its competition: the music genome. Pandora figures out what you like, not based on the band or the song, but based on the content and structure of the song. If you think about it, using a mathematical algorithm is a much more logical approach than trying to link together similar artists. I like country influenced rock and roll, with acoustic sonority, major key tonality and steel guitar, among other characteristics. Generally speaking, Pandora knows that I am much more likely to appreciate a similar song by an artist I’ve never heard than a wildly different song by a band I am familiar with. The difference between the Stones’ Loving Cup and Get Off My Cloud is greater than the difference between Exile on Main Street and some of the Deadstring Brothers records.

Another example: while writing this post a great song by Hecla & Griper played on my alt. country station. I know a lot of music, and I’d never heard of Hecla & Griper. Note to the RIAA: thanks to this great online streaming station, I just bought a copy of Songs: Ohia. So put that in yer pipe, and all that. Wow, here’s another great song by Luna, another new name. If you like music, it’s simply impossible not to dig Pandora.

Recently, Pandora began offering a premium subscription service, called Pandora One. Among the benefits are no ads of any kind (something I’m definitely willing to pay for), a new desktop application (see the photo to the left), high quality 192Kbps streaming, and an extended interaction timeout (you can listen longer without clicking anything before the app times out). All of that sounds very worth the $36 annual fee, and I have gladly subscribed.

But there is one significant drag. Fast forwards. Previously, you were allowed to fast forward (e.g., skip) only 12 songs a day. With Pandora One, the daily limit is gone, but you are still limited to 6 skips an hour, per station. Sure, you can “thumb down” a song and it won’t play again, but I take my thumbing seriously, and I hate to taint it by using it as a de facto skip button. Sometimes I’m just in the mood for another song, and I’d like to have unlimited (or at least a lot more) skips.

As I noted the other day, I have recently started using Slacker Radio, in addition to Pandora. It has a lot to offer, and the interface, while not particularly Firefox friendly, is really good. I like the way you can tinker with the new/old, hits/deep cuts, etc. settings. Mostly, I like the fact that with the premium account ($48 a year) you can fast forward as much as you like. If Slacker Radio allows unlimited skips, why doesn’t Pandora? Surely it’s not about the $12 cost difference? I’d pay at least twice that to add unlimited skipping to my Pandora stations.

At the end of the day, both services have a lot to offer. I find myself listening to Pandora more, because I have been there longer and my Pandora stations are more mature. While I continue to believe that Pandora’s mathematical approach works better, unlimited skipping is clearly an advantage for Slacker Radio.

If I had to choose, it would be Pandora by a nose. But fortunately I don’t have to choose.

A two (or more) horse race is good for consumers, and these are both strong horses.

Sound Migration: Announcing GoodSongs.Com

As I noted the other day, I need a new place to work my music jones. Blip.fm is in the process of being murdered by the music industry and my tech pals don’t want to be inundated with music here at Newsome.Org. So what’s a lover of the bayou to do?

Develop a new platform to share some great music, of course. Welcome to GoodSongs.Com!

It’s such a crazy, crazy feeling,
I get weak in the knees,
My poor old head is a reelin’,
As I go deep into the funnel of love.

By combining the Tumblr page I mentioned the other day with a previously dormant top level domain I’ve owned for a decade or so, doing some template work and adding a nice java-based music player, I’ve come up with what I believe is the perfect music recommendation site. If you’re into alt. country, country rock, blues or just good music in general, you’ll like GoodSongs.Com. Give it a listen. Subscribe to the feed. Buy the great, off the beaten path music you’ll hear there. Tell your friends. Send me your music so I can add it to the playlist.

They said, Do you remember when you saw her last,
I said, Her skin is cinnamon, her skin is cinnamon.

Note the music player at the bottom of the page. It won’t play the audio for the videos, but it will play all of the audio posts in a playlist fashion, with music player controls.

Click on that link to start the playlist

There will be quite a bit of integration between GoodSongs.Com and Newsome.Org, but the flow of music will be greater over there. For years, I have received a steady flow of music via email and snail mail from artists looking for exposure here or on Rancho Radio, our popular alt. country radio station. I plan to share a lot of that music at GoodSongs.Com, along with links to Amazon and other stores where you can buy this excellent music. There are a lot of people making the kind of fantastic music that doesn’t get played boring, ad-infested mainstream radio. I plan to be an advocate for that music, but I need your help.

Let’s play this one out, until it explodes,
Into a thousand tiny pieces,
What’s the story universe,
You are melody in numbers.

Send me music. Buy the music I feature. Wear glasses if you need ’em. And all that.

You know the bottle ain’t to blame and I ain’t trying to,
It don’t make you do a thing it just lets you,
When I’m six feet underground, I’ll need a drink or two,
And I’ll sure miss you.

Enjoy. And tell your friends.

Jay Bennett, RIP

Jay Bennett, multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and alt. country legend died unexpectedly this weekend. Jay was a member of Wilco from 1994-2001, and afterwards released several solo records. He was also a popular session player, appearing on records by Sheryl Crow, among others.

Jay and Jeff Tweedy had a contentious parting, and I hope Jay will be remembered for his epic talent, and not mostly as the dude who sued the Wilco guy. This is a loss for alt. country fans, and for music fans in general.

Here’s some great guitar work and harmony on Wilco’s California Stars. For those unfamiliar with Jay, he’s the guitarist with the longer hair and glasses.

Here’s I Don’t Have the Time from his solo record Whatever Happened I Apologize.

You can read about Jay and hear lots of his music at his MySpace page. Definitely check out the excellent By the Cigarette Machine in his music player.

Other blogs have more on Jay’s untimely passing:

Turn it Up
Cover Lay Down
Backstage Pass
On the Beat

Can Tumblr Be My New Blip.fm?

Assuming the ominous signs are correct, and Blip.fm is about to go from cool music sharing and discovery service to an RIAA-ravaged skeleton of its former self, I need a new music site to take its place. There aren’t any obvious candidates, so I have been looking far afield in search of a new music hangout. While I post regular music-related content here at Newsome.Org, it’s not the best place for frequent video posts and short links to good public MP3s.

While it’s not perfect, I think I may have found my new thing. Tumblr. Sure, I’ve known about Tumblr for a while, but until this past weekend I hadn’t used it. I signed up on Saturday and spent a little time creating my Tumblr page.

Let’s take a closer look.

Registration is easy. Afterwards, you can choose from a ready-made Theme or write (or hack) your own, via a small but functional custom HTML box.

It’s a pretty simple exercise to customize your Tumblr page, and add whatever links and other information you want to display. After you get your layout the way you want it, it’s time to add some content. This is where Tumblr really shines.

Via the Tumblr Dashboard, from which you manage your Tumblr page layout and content, there are forms to upload or embed text, photos, quotes, links, chat transcripts, audio and video. The cornucopia of sharing options reminds me of all the reasons Pownce was a vastly superior content sharing platform compared to the more popular and celebrity-infested, but feature-challenged, Twitter.

The audio and video forms allow you to either upload an audio or video file or to embed a file hosted elsewhere. Particularly helpful is the ability to embed a YouTube video merely by pasting the URL into the form. The process is as simple as it could be.

An even better way to add YouTube videos to your Tumblr page is via the Tumblr bookmarklet. When you share content with the bookmarklet from a YouTube page, the video is automatically embedded in your Tumblr page, along with a descriptive caption. This is a really cool feature. If Tumblr could add the ability to do the same thing with audio links, perhaps via a right click, Tumblr could take media sharing to a whole new level.

There’s a very neat iPhone app, a Mac Dashboard Widget (which I haven’t tried) and the ability to add audio posts via your phone, which might be cool to do from a live performance. You can also add posts via email, or IM. And there are a ton of third party apps to explore and experiment with.

One of those third party apps adds one very important feature– the ability to play all of your audio posts in a playlist equivalent.

Once you add some content, you can also edit or delete posts via the Dashboard.

At the end of the process, you get a really cool page with mixed media in one handy place. There is an optional Twitter integration, that will post links to your posts to your Twitter account, and there is the ability to add up to five RSS feeds to your Tumblr page. One thing I do not like, is the layout of the archive page. It’s ugly and, well just ugly. And I don’t see any way to customize it.

Tumblr also lacks to built-in audience and sharing features (props, listeners, re-blips, responses, etc.) of Blip.fm. This is a big drawback, but if the empty bag holding RIAA is determined to kill the cool services like Blip.fm and all the music sales they promote, it may be that non-centralized locations may be the only way to go if you want to remain relatively unshackled.

While Tumblr has more than enough features to serve as the sharing equivalent of Blip.fm, it does not yet provide the same discovery function. I’m not sure how to address that problem. One idea would be to collaborate on and post a shared Tumblr blog roll of similar music pages (the Tumblr directory doesn’t seem to serve a close enough function). A better idea might be to share a Tumblr page with a group of like-minded music fans. That’s something I will probably explore if I can find some other folks who like a good mix of alt. country, country rock, classic rock and blues.

In the meantime, check out my Tumblr page for some good music. And if you’re an artist doing that sort of music, send me an MP3 file or link and I’ll see about adding it to the playlist.

Snowmen in the Sun: the End of Blip.fm?

blipfm I have written favorably about Blip.fm, the web site and application that lets you share music with others in a Twitter-like fashion. I’ve been a regular user for several months, and until now have been putting together an awesome A-Z new wave playlist. As with any fun online music service, however, there’s always been a concern in the back of my mind that, like Frosty the Snowman, Blip.fm was too good to last. And it looks like the melting has begun.

Jeff Yasuda, the head of the Blip.fm development team, has announced that some changes are coming. And none of them are good.

First of all, the music available at Blip.fm will soon be coming almost exclusively from Imeem, another music discovery service. I’ve never used Imeem, but a quick look tells me we are talking about a severely reduced universe of songs. A search at Imeem returned exactly one Star Room Boys song, compared to the twenty or so you used to find at Blip.fm. And not a single Steve Pride song. How can you consider yourself a music service and not have a single copy of, say, Welcome to the Big Time? If you want to hear the best alternative country record ever made or ever to be made, go buy Pride on Pride.

While you may not have to visit Imeem to stream the songs via Blip.fm, the interface at Imeem is about as fun as a root canal. Compared to the simple elegance of the Blip.fm site, it is a chaotic mashup of train wrecks. In sum, I have zero interest in Imeem as a service, and the resulting reduction in available songs will materially diminish the fun factor at Blip.fm, especially for users like me who look for old or obscure music.

Adding to the pain is a new limitation on adding songs from public locations. Currently, if you know the URL for an mp3, you can easily add that song to your Blip.fm playlist. Under the new plan, public mp3s will be limited to “legitimate bands and labels approved in our systems.” There’s a sign-up form at Blip.fm where I suppose labels and perhaps independent artists can sign up to get their music included in the new database.

There are other changes. The Blip.fm widget, which was crappy already, will only list the song but will not generally play it.

And, as the biggest bummer of all, current songs on your playlist will be replaced, where possible, by content from the Imeem catalog, and any song not in that catalog will “temporarily” cease to play. I don’t know what that means for songs that aren’t and won’t be in the Imeem catalog, but it doesn’t sound good for my new wave playlist.

There are promises about forthcoming new partnerships that may allow additional content, and I hope that happens.

But until the music industry as we have known it dies and is reborn as a direct artist to consumer market, the Blip.fm’s of the world are like snowmen in the sun. You better enjoy them while you can, because it’s only a matter of time before they melt.

The Jim Jones Revue, Rocked, Rolled and Reviewed

One of life’s great pleasures is discovering a new band that really blows you away. I had one of those moments today when, thanks to 30 Days Out, I discovered The Jim Jones Revue.

Start with the true father of rock and roll, Little Richard. Add big helping of vintage punk rock attitude, and a hard charging, rip-roaring, garage band-style blues vibe. Then crank up the volume, toss your head around wildly and start digging The Jim Jones Revue’s self-titled record. Released last year, this record completely and relentlessly rocks. From the first second of the first song, Princess & the Frog to the last second of the last song, Cement Mixer, this record simply doesn’t let up. Unadulterated rock and roll. It sounds like The Black Keys on some Carlos Castaneda-inspired mushroom trip. And I mean that in a good way.

Need to hear it for yourself? Take a listen to Hey Hey Hey Hey. If that doesn’t rock your socks off, you must be barefooted and deaf.

If you like rock and roll, go buy this record right now. And turn it up.

While you’re at it, imagine for a moment that you’re back in the golden era of music videos, watching 120 Minutes, and this comes pouring out of your TV.

Not too shabby, huh?

Is It Time to Put Sirius XM on Deathwatch?

One of my primary online pastimes is watching technology I like go through agonizing death spirals. TIVO is still twitching a little, and I had hope that the not-so-forthcoming new DirecTV box was going to spur a comeback of Billsian, if not Biblical, proportions. I’m in a wait and see mode, but not as hopeful as I’d like to be.

Another technology I have enjoyed is satellite radio. I’ve been an XM subscriber for years, and the merger with Sirius gave me the improved Classic Vinyl station, and the far too Americana (I greatly prefer alt. country) Outlaw Country. And I lost track of Bill Anderson‘s excellent talk show (which should be released on a CD boxed set). But overall, I thought the merger was necessary and, at worst, a wash for listeners.

Yet the combined Sirius XM continues to lose subscribers. My personal view is that they way overpaid for the Oprahs and Howards, which I have no interest in, and sports, which I have interest in, but not via radio. As a result, they have to charge me more to subsidize those who care about that stuff. But that may not be what’s really hurting Sirius/XM.

I think it might be iPhones and other almost as smart phones. Here’s my theory.

First, I am convinced that the lion’s share of satellite radio listening is done in the car, a theory which has some support in the details regarding the subscriber loss. I have logged maybe two hours of in the house satellite radio listening over the years. Previously, the amount of daily time I spend in my car combined with my well documented aversion to ads made satellite radio worth the money, in both hardware and monthly costs.

But lately I find that I am getting the large majority of my music from Pandora and Slacker Radio. The depth of programming options are simply greater there. I have a deeply targeted alt. country station on each, as well as a blues mix that plays the sort of blues I like, without most of the stuff I don’t. I like early ska and reggae- I have a station for that. I like zydeco- yep, I have a station for that. In sum, I can fine tune my preferences much, much better with Pandora and Slacker Radio than I can with Sirius XM. In fact, I’m finding myself listening to my online options even more than I listen to songs on my music server at home- and I have a ton of music on there.

Plus, online stations allow me to access my music more easily and from more places. When I’m at a computer, it’s easy to tune into one of my Pandora or Slacker Radio stations. No additional hardware needed. Both services have excellent iPhone apps (Sirius XM doesn’t have one). Lately, when I’m in my car, I have found myself plugging my iPhone into the auxiliary input on my audio system and listening to Pandora or Slacker Radio while I’m driving. Better mix, no ads.

On top of all that, it’s cheaper. Why buy special hardware and pay through the nose for a satellite radio subscription – for each device, no less – when you could pay much less for a premium online radio subscription that you can take with you anywhere? It sounds like a no-brainer, because I think it probably is.

For the moment, I have both. But if I had to choose one or the other, I would quickly choose Pandora/Slacker Radio over Sirius XM.

And I suspect that trend will continue to work against satellite radio.

From the Jukebox: John the Wolf King of LA

John the Wolf King of LA (1970) is the first solo record by John Phillips, one of the leaders of and primary songwriters for the Mamas and the Papas. It’s a mildly countrified record (largely thanks to Buddy Emmons’ excellent pedal steel work), with several excellent songs, including my favorite, “Topanga Canyon.” Most of the songs dealt with recent events in Phillips’ life, including references to his new girlfriend Genevieve Waite (the sort of freaky “Let it Bleed, Genevieve”) and longtime friend Ann Marshall (the Emmons’ featuring “April Anne”).

Phillips was the primary songwriter and musical arranger of the Mamas and the Papas, and had a major hand in the band’s string of hits. He also wrote “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”, the 1967 Scott McKenzie hit, and the oft-covered “Me and My Uncle,” which was popularized (at least to me) by the Grateful Dead. He co-wrote the Beach Boys‘ hit “Kokomo.”

The performances on this record are spectacular. Phillips was backed by an all-star group of musicians, including members of Elvis Presley’s band, including James Burton, among others. Other members of the Mamas and the Papas said that if the band had recorded the material from John the Wolf King of LA, it might have been their best album.

The very cool album cover was the inspiration for Bob Dylan’s wardrobe and pose on Dylan’s excellent 1976 album Desire.

This was one of my turntable mainstays back in the 70’s, and I rediscovered it when it was rereleased a few years ago, with several bonus tracks. It’s not quite country enough to fit squarely in my early country rock sweet spot (in some alternate universe somewhere Clarence White brought his B-Bender magic to this record), but it’s plenty good and, unlike a lot of music of the era, has aged well. It sounds as good today as it did the first time I heard it.

Why Slacker Radio May Become My Music App of Choice

After seeing and ignoring references to Slacker Radio for a long time, I recently came across a pretty positive review and decided to take a look. While I am a long-time and loyal Pandora user, I’m a big believer in multiple consumer choices. I’m glad I decided to take the Slacker Radio plunge. I don’t know if it will supplant Pandora as my favorite online music source, but it might. What was once a Pandora landslide is now too close to call.

Here’s Kent’s Vinyl, my classic rock station for you to sample while you enjoy this exciting post. Or if you prefer, my alternative country station.

Here’s what I like about Slacker Radio. First and foremost, I like the way you create and customize a station. You start with a single song or artist. Like any sane person, I started my classic rock station with the Allman Brothers. Then I added the Grateful Dead. I really like the list of allegedly similar artists (I say allegedly because you can’t get much father from the Dead than the Eagles (see image below)) that appears on the right hand side, where you can quickly select additional artists to seed your station.

I also like the lack of ads and the ability to skip as many songs as you want, which features are available with the paid “Plus” subscription ($4.00 a month, paid annually). With that plan, you’re supposed to be able to access detailed artist information and song lyrics, but I couldn’t get the lyrics feature to work in Firefox. It worked in Internet Explorer.

The thing that keeps me running back to Pandora is the music genome thing- where the application selects songs based on the tempo, tonality, arrangement, etc. of the songs you indicate you like. There are a lot of songs I would like out there by bands I don’t know. Pandora does a great job of exposing me to songs I really like by bands I know little or nothing about. I don’t know if the Slacker Radio algorithm will do as well, but so far I have been pleased by the selection. For example, the third song that played on my classic rock station was Sea of Joy by Blind Faith- a song I love.

I also like the ability to “fine tune” your station. By selecting the appropriate level, you can tell the app how much you’re interested in songs from other artists, how many deep cuts you want to hear and, most importantly, if you want old songs, new songs or a combination. Since 95% of my favorite classic rock songs were recorded prior to 1978, I chose older. Some of my favorite bands have kept on truckin’ beyond my loyalty.

On the downside, Slacker Radio’s web design is not particularly intuitive, in a Photobucket sort of way. I also noticed a lot of hangs when navigating between options in Firefox. In fact, I found the navigation to be profoundly difficult, mostly due to page freezes, accompanied by the never-ending little spinning circle (you’ll know it when you see it). Again, I didn’t have these problems in Internet Explorer, but I’m not going to change browsers for one music app.

The iPhone app is excellent. I was able to listen to my stations over wi-fi and 3G with little lag. In fact, I connected my iPhone to the auxiliary input on the audio system in my truck and listened to my station on the way home from work.

If they (or I) get this Firefox thing figured out, and if the algorithm works, Slacker Radio has a chance to supplant my beloved Pandora as my music app of choice.