Archive | March, 2011

Listening to New Music: Part 2

21 Mar

In my first Listening to New Music post, I talked about my tendency towards picking a few singles off an album and never really listening to the whole CD from start to finish. After writing that post, I got to thinking and decided to commit to picking an album every month that I would listen to in its entirety. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to the album Furr by Blitzen Trapper. Some songs are really growing on me and others are a bit too loud for me and I find myself skipping them. I definitely find that I crave more of a variety (still addicted to those playlists) and I am not as patient as I used to be when it comes to listening to an album in its entirety. Although, I had an interesting observation the other day…if the album is an actual CD that we bought (as opposed to residing in my iTunes library on my computer) it tends to get some serious playtime in our CD player in the kitchen. Last spring I bought my husband 2 CDs as part of his father’s day present; She & Him: Volume 2 and Sarah McLachlan: Laws Of Illusion. We listened to them both LOTS and I love them!

Shortly after my first “Listening to New Music” post, my sister and I were chatting and she told me about a website called eMusic . eMusic is a digital music club that makes finding and buying music a total joy. All music purchased from their site is yours to own (not rented or streamed) and you decide which membership level you want to sign up for. The basic membership is $11.99/month which gives you $11.99 worth of music and all other membership levels give you bonus credit. For example, if you sign up for the eMusic Plus plan, you pay $15.99/month but get $16.99 worth of music credit. The higher the membership level, the more music credit you receive. You can buy singles or albums (typically for less than they cost on iTunes and Amazon). As a bonus, you get $20 of credit just for signing up! Those who know me, know that I cannot resist a deal…so I decided to join. BTW- if you are interested in checking eMusic out with a free $10.00 credit, let me know and I can forward you an invitation. There is no need to join if you don’t want to and you can keep all of the music that you downloaded.

So far, I’ve been very pleased with eMusic. I love the amount of information you can get for each album (critic’s review, user’s reviews, user’s star ratings, concert information if they happen to be on tour, as well as related artists and other album recommendations). It is super easy to create/save lists of albums that you might want to buy later. In the short time that I’ve been an eMusic member, I have already accumulated quite a list of music I might want to buy in the future as well as decided to buy an album from an artist that I had never heard of (An Australian band called The Beautiful Girls). The ratings and reviews for their US debut album, as well as listening to the short clips of the songs had me purchasing with great confidence. You can go to eMusic to check out the entire album Learn Yourself as well as enjoy listening/watching their track “Music” below. Quite apropos if you ask me!

All Summer

12 Mar

Check out this fun song. I discovered it when listening to a playlist on 8tracks. It is an interesting trio: Kid Cudi, Best Coast and Rostam of Vampire Weekend and the song was made exclusively for Converse. It is catchy and certainly gets me excited about the possibility of warm summer days. March is a rough month here on MV and we need every little bit of upbeat summer inspiration that we can get.

Check it out the video here (scroll down to the “video” link):

All Summer

You can also download the song for free (click on “download the track” on the same page with the video). And on another note…I’m looking forward to checking out some of Best Coast’s music. I had not heard of them before hearing this song.

Listening to New Music

5 Mar

This is a topic that I find quite curious. Lots has changed since iTunes and music apps came along (at least for me). In the “olden days”, as my girls like to say, I would hear a song on the radio and then I would hope that the DJ would say who the artist was. There was also a time that I would go the used record store with my dad and sister and we would buy an album because the cover looked interesting, or because a friend had mentioned that we should check them out, or because we had heard them on the radio. Then, you would most likely listen to the whole record (waiting desperately to hear the song that you really liked). Once CDs came along (I think our family got a CD player sometime around 1985– dad, feel free to correct me if I am wrong), you could skip to the track that you really wanted to hear. But ultimately, you would end up listening to the whole album which meant getting to really know the deep cuts. This meant getting to discover some outstanding tracks that never got any airplay. 

Flash forward to the present. Now when you hear a song (on the radio, in a tv show, from a movie, while you are in a restaurant, just about anywhere really) you can use the Shazam app to “tag” it and find out the name of the artist and song. Amazing! Such instant gratification. If you don’t already have Shazam, you should definitely check out it. Then you can decide whether you want to buy the single from iTunes or whether you want to go ahead and get the whole album. In either case, I find that I hardly ever listen to an album in its entirety. I either just get the single, or if I get the album I end up putting the track that I really liked (plus maybe a couple others that sound interesting) onto a playlist with a bunch of other new music. The upside is the instant gratification of listening to all this new music that I am eager to check out. The downside is that I feel like there is tons of music I never end up  listening to. I also recognize that I am likely missing out on the musician’s artistic expression. Isn’t there something to be said about the album as a whole composition? 

I’d be curious to know how you discover and listen to new music these days.