Springwise: Prefunded, crowdmanaged music festival. get a local sponser and have the audience decide who, when, and where.

DRM sucks redux: Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys. PlayForSure has to be one of the biggest fuck-up misnomer brands ever. via ram.

Nigerian Gangster - The Jay-z, Fela Kuti mashup of American Gangster. full download. if new hiphop sounded like this, i’d probably listen to more of it.

Nikolay Saveliev, Pop Matters. “Nickelback: the recursiveness of professional mediocrity”. now that’s great.

Muxtape + Fluid + AirFoil. turn muxtapes into a stand-alone app and pump it to your airport express.


YouTube - Bono talking about Roy Orbison and Mystery Girl. i had no idea Bono wrote Mystery Girl. Orbison’s voice is unreal in that song.

jstn.cc : Muxtape, 24 hour mark “8,685 users / 19,731 songs / 35,000 visits / $118.17 on S3″. that’s gotta be getting expensive. via josh.

Apple passes Wal-Mart, now #1 music retailer in US. that’s insane. via josh.

THE GQ&A: KEITH RICHARDS. Long interview. Random funny stories about being a rock legend.

Muxtape. a simple way to create and share mixtapes. i think their s3 bill is gonna be huge.

Would You Pay An Extra $100 For An All-You-Can-Listen-To iPod. financial times is reporting that apple is shopping the idea to record labels.

20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups of All Time :: Blender.com. some great ones.

Macworld | Apple now No. 2 music retailer in the U.S.. dang.

Sasquatch 2008 lineup. damn, that’s good.

Vancouver based singer-songwriter Steve St. Pierre covering Blister in the Sun. interesting take.

Obama: Yes We Can Song. nothing like a political speech mashup. via ram.

Sony Joins Other Labels on Amazon MP3 Store - New York Times. i guess that means DRM for music is officially dead.

CBC Radio3 Top 100 of 2007 playlist. i plan on listening to all of this.

Amazon Adds Warner Music to DRM-Free Roster. one more major label to go.

best song of 2007 + notable album #4

ga ga ga ga ga
I went back and forth on whether to put Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga on the best-of list. There’s a couple songs on the album I’m not too crazy about like The Ghost of You Lingers and Eddie’s Ragga but, in the end, I thought this was overshadowed by the fantastic stuff that’s on the album. And by fantastic, I mean the best.

After much much contemplation I decree that You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb is the song of the year. Though several songs on the album grew on me, this one was love within 30 seconds. The song starts off with a great hard driving drum beat and a fucking stellar bass riff, something I find I can rarely ever really distinguish. But the real genius strikes you once the hook kicks in with its big horn section and the tambourine in the drums. It strikes me as an stellar mix of pop-rock (Beatles’ pop-rock, not modern day pop-rock) with the bass, tambourines, and horns that make up the Motown sound. Honestly, we need a Motown sound revival. I don’t think anyone’s really gonna top Stevie Wonder but it’s worth trying.

Two other songs on the album are also worth severely pointing out. First, The Underdog. I think I’m a sucker for a rock song with a horn section (and hand claps, love the hand claps). The best part of the song is the build-ups to the chorus. You know how every great Daft Punk song builds up to the chorus so perfectly that by the time it gets there you’re like “fuck yeah!”. This song has that same kinda feeling. Britt Daniel’s even yells out “Right!” right before the last chorus, signifying exactly what I mean. It’s a very celebratory song and was actually used perfectly this year in an episode of How I Met Your Mother when the gang is at the bar celebrating the fact that Marshall passed the Bar exam.

Second, is Black Like Me. I don’t know how to explain this song so I’ll just steal Pitchfork’s comment as it made their top 100 songs of the year: “Emotionally, Black Like Me is heartland indie rock territory, and Spoon know the tiny details that make songs bleed you a little”.