Category: music
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Pandora Mobile highlights awesomeness but also severe lame-itude
Do you know Pandora? If you’re in the United States, where Pandora is legally available, you may have come to enjoy this awesome uber-customizable music radio over the past years. If you’re not in the U.S., perhaps you’ve discovered the beauty of anonymous proxies :cough:, which I’m not going to mention here :p. But perhaps…
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A music solution that’s so brilliant, no wonder why the music industry has shunned it
The other day I got a (yet another) piece of inbox spam on the otherwise cool service last.fm. And no good can come from spam, right? Not sure what got into me, but I actually went to the site (which I’ll not name, so as to not potentially give them any customers). And you know…
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A cappella birthday silliness — much of it composed by me
Back in high school, I was not only a band geek, but a choir geek as well! But I did far more than just sing your standard choral music :-D. I loved composing, arranging and teaching, and often performing short songs in vocal quartets, and I founded my very own singing telegram business (“The Birthday…
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Great ways to discover and (legally) listen to music online
Here are a few thoughts on music services I’m in love with online. CAVEAT: Many, if not all of these only work in a limited number of countries due to lame licensing complications… typically the United States, often coupled with Canada and/or the UK. And it’d be wrong, oh so wrong to use proxies to…
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Katamari Damacy – Why is the music so hard to find?!
Updated Mar 2024 to note that album is now on streaming services! Well, hell hath frozen over! More than 15 years after writing my lament here, the Katamari Fortissimo Damacy is now available online; enjoy! This morning at work I was chatting with a colleague about my morning commute, and I don’t know what got…
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[Music] Instrumental Jazz Soloists – If you can’t sing it, don’t play it
I’m guessing most of you probably just think of me as an Internet geek, but I used to be a classical pianist geek, choir geek, and jazz pianist geek. I have performed over 200 times, won a bunch of Bach festivals, and studied under jazz greats Ashley Alexander, Frank Mantooth, and others. This does not…
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Fair use, mashups, and profits – why hasn’t anyone figured this out yet?
Lots of us love music and we love to share it; I think that’s even more powerful than simply “grab lots of music for free”—it’s the sharing that excites us, motivates us. Music is a shared experience! Why, then, hasn’t anyone made it easy to share music snippets legally from a simple iframe, a simple…
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Don’t Download This Song! (listen to another gem by Weird Al Yankovic)
Unless you’re a fan of the RIAA or a bitter, clueless artist… I urge you to run, er, click, not walk to go hear Weird Al’s new ditty: “Don’t Download This Song.” [warning: music autoplays]. I’m looking forward to the music video promised for this evening, but in the meantime, you can hear the song…
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Brave Combo rocks in countless ways. Here’s why you will love them, too
Brave Combo is 26-year-old (!) “hot jazz quintet, a rollicking rock’n’roll bar band, a Tex-Mex conjunto, a sizzling blues band, a saucy cocktail combo, a deadly serious novelty act, a Latin orchestra, and one of America’s dance bands par excellence.” [see their bio page] But they kick ass for many other reasons, too. For those…
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Yet more awesome a cappella & an affordable music studio
First, a quick note to those SEOs who are still reading my blog hoping for detailed Google search-related tidbits. It’s still unlikely. If I ever do post nuggets of search wisdom here, I’m sure you’ll hear about it :-D. With that said, Google is moving ahead to improve communications, both internally and externally; I recently…