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Links tagged with “music”

  1. The Problem with Muzak | Liz Pelly

    Although I love having so much music available in Spotify, I’m increasingly aware how often I use it unthinkingly just for “background music for working” which I’m not very proud of. So even aside from these odd industry-changing effects, I’m feeling uneasy about Spotify.

  2. Massive dump of Spotify created playlists - 1.4k+ genres, 12k+ playlists! : spotify

    Amazing, but it’s annoying this stuff is practically impossible to discover or browse in the app itself. Even having seen everynoise.com before, I didn’t realise all these playlists existed.

  3. Music and Social Justice / or Why Many Musicians Should Not Release Records for General Public Consumption

    Equating spending money on promoting your music (or, presumably, any other art) with perpetuating your privileged position.

  4. Music blogs | Everett True’s advice for aspiring music critics (revised and expanded) | COLLAPSE BOARD

    From 2011.

  5. The Disquiet Junto Project List (0001 – 0265 …)

    A weekly assignment for composing music. “The purpose of the group is to use constraints to stoke creativity.” A nice list of all the projects. (via Russell Davies)

  6. Summertime.fm

    Annual summery mix tapes from DJ Jazzy Jeff & MICK. (via Waxy)

  7. Post-Internet Sound

    Holly Herndon & Jennifer Walshe: “we are attempting to put together an archive of sound and music works dealing with the internet since its inception” (via @cityofsound)

  8. ListenBrainz

    Open source AudioScrobbler type service, currently Alpha. In theory I imported my Last.fm listens, but nothing showing up yet. Still, could be good.

  9. My Secret World: The Story of Sarah Records / In Depth // Drowned In Sound

    Nice. And I had no idea the Matt who edited ‘Smoke’ was one half of Sarah Records!

  10. Jam Preserves - The Jam Journal

    This Is My Jam will be closing, but doing it right with a browsable archive and even a read-only API. Very nice. A shame though, and a shame about the changes in other services that made it difficult to carry on.

  11. No Rock And Roll Fun: What the pop papers say: The last NME

    “If hip hop won - and that’s not an unfair suggestion - then the NME was very much the warrior who didn’t hear the war was at an end; fighting on deep in the jungle.”

  12. Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music | New Home on Techno.org

    I first bookmarked this in 2004, at its old URL and it’s still going. Explore genres of electronic music in a whizzy interface.

  13. Every Noise at Once

    Clickable, listenable, expandable map of musical genres from Echonest data. Nice. (via @tomtaylor)

  14. Shoegaze: An Oral History

    What it says. Not *hugely* interesting to be honest.

  15. Rap Stats | Rap Genius

    I love hearing songs that mention Internet things when they’re still pretty new. A graph showing usage of social media brand names over time. (via Kottke)

  16. Pharrell Williams - Happy

    So good. I could (and am) watch this for ages.

  17. 8-bit reggae project

    Links to several 8-bit reggae tunes at the end of the post.

  18. The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

    This is great stuff. I’d love to hear more music like this that’s played through something more substantial than MIDI instruments. I think. (via Kottke)

  19. Indietracks Compilation 2013 | Indietracks Festival

    Only £2 (or more) for 47 tracks of nice twee pop, with proceeds going to old trains.

  20. The Online Photographer: (OT) All You Need for Great Sound

    Suggestion for great-sounding iPhone/iPad amp and small speakers. More suggestions in the comments.

  21. Spoogeworld lost musical documentation

    Includes a scan of a page from ‘Keyboard’ magazine in 1987 which shows you Brian Eno’s favourite patches for the Yamaha DX7 for you to tap in.

  22. The Shrieking Violet: The Would Be’s - I’m Hardly Ever Wrong

    An interview with the Would Be’s from 2009. I had no idea they were so young when ‘I’m Hardly Ever Wrong’ came out. (Also, they have an album out in May!)

  23. Archived Music Press | Scans from the Melody Maker and N.M.E. circa 1987-1996

    Lots of blasts from the past here. The couple of copies of MM/NME that I still have are intriguing, mainly the small and unimportant bits rather than the high-profile interviews etc usually featured here.

  24. Dandelion Radio | Mixcloud

    Ooh, Dandelion are putting their previous month’s shows on Mixcloud. Brill. Rocker’s my favourite, but lots of good stuff generally.

  25. The Amen break: Just a sample | The Economist

    Finally got round to reading/listening to all of this, 15 months after everyone else linked to it. I love this stuff, because I’m so oblivious to the details of samples normally.

  26. TV Networks, Algorithms and the Demise of HMV

    I’m not sure i buy all of this, but some interesting thoughts in there. Almost says that without better discovery tools, Spotify is like HMV, huge but daunting and soulless. (via Paul Mison)

  27. Philgyford’s 2012 Jam Odyssey

    Brilliant thing. I put more stuff on ThisIsMyJam than I thought I had. And this makes me want to do more in 2013.

  28. The Quietus | Features | Quietus Albums Of The Year So Far 2012

    I’ve only heard of five of these 50 artists. I’m so, so out of touch. Still, more music to try. (via Beyond the Beyond)

  29. Simon Frith - Post-punk Blues (PDF)

    Another article I don’t think I’ve read, from 1983, also cited by Rebekka Kill.

  30. History is made at night: In Defence of Disco - Richard Dyer

    I somehow haven’t read this 1979 essay. Cited by Rebekka Kill at Improving Reality.

  31. Underworld’s brief to ‘frighten people’ at the London 2012 opening ceremony | Music | The Guardian

    “The contrast between this summer’s two uber-spectaculars – the diamond jubilee concert and the Olympics opening ceremony – couldn’t be starker.” Yes, it felt like we’ve moved on from big events requiring 1980s musicians. (via Blech)

  32. Indietracks Festival

    Jolly nice, virtually free, 52-track compilation of twee/indiepop tunes. How can you go wrong, unless you hate nice things?

  33. The Brilliant Music of Ravel by Charles Rosen | The New York Review of Books

    As someone who’s only awareness of Ravel is what I think of as the flouncy Torville & Dean ‘Bolero’, I love the descriptions here (especially in section 3) of exactly why Ravel’s music was avant-garde. Unfortunately, subscribers only.

  34. Soul Sides / Sliced: Breaking Down: The Emotions’ “Blind Alley” (Stax, 1972)

    I like this way of discussing a song, displaying annotations while it plays.

  35. Writing About Music is Like Dancing About Architecture | Quote Investigator

    Quite lengthy investigation of the elusive origins of that quote. (via @alanconnor)

  36. Said the Gramophone: BEST SONGS OF 2011

    As ever, StG’s top 100 tunes of the year is a lovely listen.

  37. Why Spotify can never be profitable: The secret demands of record labels — Tech News and Analysis

    A look at the “demands that digital music companies [like Spotify, Rdio, etc] are compelled to agree to” by the major record labels. “Onerous” would be a word. (via Blech)

  38. The Dark Side of the Moon - The 8-bit Album : Various Artists : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

    I’m not a huge fan of Pink Floyd or 8-bit music, beyond novelty, but this was actually rather good stuff. (via Dandelion Radio)

  39. Spotify Instant

    Find-as-you-type search of Spotify. Tab, hit Return and the track plays in Spotify. Nice.

  40. Echofi - Better Spotify Radio

    Enter an artist name and it plays a stream of similar artists (chosen using Echo Nest) in Spotify.

  41. Liesen/spotify-api-server - GitHub

    “Implementation of parts of the Spotify playlist API. … It’s a web server that talks to Spotify using libspotify.”

  42. First Watch: The Decemberists, ‘Calamity Song’ : All Songs Considered Blog : NPR

    Music video based on the Eschaton tennis scene from David Foster Wallace’s novel ‘Infinite Jest’. Totally. Awe. Some. My insides have been touched all over.

  43. Groovify your music tweets - Denoiser the better

    Tweet a song and @groovify generates a Spotify or Grooveshark playlist based on it.

  44. Spotibot.com - Generate Spotify Playlists powered by Lastfm!

    Makes Spotify playlists based on the name of a music artist or your Last.fm favorites/recommendations.

  45. Nicky Wire on Lipstick Traces : The Thought Fox

    A new introduction by Nicky Wire to a new edition of Greil Marcus’s ‘Lipstick Traces’ which I owe another read. (via Alan Connor)

  46. Total recall: why retromania is all the rage | Music | The Guardian

    This is all very good, on retro of many kinds. “How come the very kind of people who would have once been in the vanguard of creating new music (bohemian early adopter types) have switched roles to become antiquarians and curators?”

  47. Grime_tapes : grimetapes.com : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

    Grimetapes.com (which was archiving loads of old grime cassettes) appears to have disappeared, but it looks like they put some(?) of the files on archive.org.

  48. The Wire: A Brief History Of Grime Tapes

    Some streams/MP3s of recordings of early(?) grime sets on pirate radio. I’m enjoying the first one so far. (via Shaun at Ruby Pseudo)

  49. Daniel Rosenthal’s answer to Why is U2 so popular? - Quora

    “You’re not only dancing and reminiscing – you’re spreading freedom and reasonably-priced medicines to distant lands!” (via Shaun at Ruby Pseudo)

  50. Playlist for Mudd Up! with DJ/Rupture - April 18, 2011

    Pretty much just listening to this one on repeat at the moment.

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