calebbrown.id.au

I love music and the internet has certainly fostered that love. No longer do I have to depend just on the radio, friendly recommendations and music-store-serendipity to find music I might like. With the Internet I can now pull up an artist's bio, scan through a complete discography, sample their music, listen to similar artists, and then buy the single song I was looking for.

So I thought I'd share some of the sites that I've found and use regularly (see below). You probably know some of them already, but if I missed one, leave it in the comments.

Over the last 28 hours I've had the pleasure of enjoying some really, really good, catchy songs. The first is "We Don't Stop" by Michael Franti & Spearhead, off their album Everybody Deserves Music, and the other is "The Promise" by When in Rome, which I heard on the credits to Napoleon Dynamite¹.

There are songs that I consider good, in that they are memorable tunes that leave a lasting impression and are worth owning on CD. But some songs are beyond just being called good. There is usually something in them that tweaks some emotion that just makes you want to hit the repeat button over and over again.

I've come up with a new way to listen to my music. In the past when I've listened to music I've just picked an artist and started playing their music on shuffle. I was kinda getting bored of that and had some inspiration this morning on a new way I could experience my music.

My new technique involves creating a playlist in iTunes where half the songs are from one artist, and the other half a from another artist. The idea is to have the most unlikely artists stuck together to come up with a really strange mix.

So far I've tried Black Eyed Peas with The Blues Brothers, INXS with Infusion and Queen with Ugly Duckling. Hip hop with R&B, Rock with Electronica, and Hip Hop with, well, Queen. So far they've all worked together, and its much better than listening to one artist or all the artists in my collection.

Mylo has a track out called In My Arms. Now that may not seem like noteworthy news until, that is, you realise the main sample in the song is from an old Boy Meets Girl song, called Waiting for a Star to Fall. Now unlike the two songs mentioned in my earlier post here, this track is a welcome dose of variety. Besides just having a short sample of the phrase "in my arms" repetitively used throughout, a highly predictable structure, and a severe lack of redeeming features besides its 'dancability' it is still much better than having two independent acts releasing essentially the same remix.