The Web Is For Music

The "New" Media

Slowly but surely the CD is going the way of the 8-track, pushed out by a superior medium, that being the digital ether of the interweb. Getting music online puts more power in the hands of you, the consumer, in letting you pick and choose not just between genres and artists, but individual songs, and even variants on songs. Everything a music store has to offer plus much more is available for your mixing and matching pleasure, all at low or no cost.

Which leads to my next point: I never really bought CDs growing up, first of all because I didn't know what I'd like best without buying it, and second of all because I hate spending money. Emblematic of those frustrations was the time I spent too much on a Green Day CD for the song "Good Riddance", only to find that I hated the other 12 songs on the disk. Today, iTunes shakes that first chain, allowing you to sample the music for 30 seconds, and then buy just the songs you like for a dollar a pop. But thats still a dollar I'd rather not spend, especially when I tend to listen to a song 3 or 4 times and then forget about it for the rest of my life.

Your (Free) Options

Research is a critical and surprisingly simple step. I mean, of course there are the obvious songs that you need to have and listen to, but then there are the ones from years ago, the refrain of which might pop into your head once a year. In either case, the google search is simple: type in those words you remember, "hard times good celebrate baby " + the word "lyrics", and voila, you've a page full of links to sites that wanna tell you what you were looking for.

Listening is the next step, and if you want a quick fix for your song, your best bet is going to be Youtube. Using our previous query for lyrics, we need only search for the song title we found and then the first hit will be Fatboy Slim's cracked out music video for his song, Praise You. From there, the related links sometimes get lucky with suggesting other good songs, but I'm often disappointed. Furthermore, building a youtube playlist can be labor intensive when you really just want something going on in the background.

Recommendations for music you might like have never been easier to come by than with Pandora Radio. Pandora is an ingenious service from the Music Genome Project. They have parsed and categorized thousands (millions?) of songs by class, character, tonal and compositional attributes, and have a pretty good idea what two songs do and don't have in common. In a sleek interface, you tell them a song you like, and they give you a radio station that will only play songs related to it. Of course, in the end this is a robot in charge of matters of taste, so it gets better if you train it (thumbs up or down), but if you pick a good song, you'll be pleased with the results!



Downloading is unfortunately an increasingly frustrating task. Gone are the days when you could download from Napster without care or concern, because now its been made abundantly clear that downloading illegal stuff is stealing (and you wouldn't steal a CD, car or handbag, would you?). Limewire is still out there, but the warnings against P2P downloads are only getting stiffer, and the risks more apparent. Besides, downloading to your hard drive is SO 90's, the future is streamed baby.

Happy listening everyone.

Engadget Wearables

For those unfamiliar, Engadget is a technology blog network with the scoop on all the latest and greatest in dorkware and geekdom. While the overwhelming majority of posts that litter its front page relate to flatscreens and playstations, there are a few hidden gems. For example, if you scroll down a little, look under "Sections" and click wearables, you will find a repository of the fantastical daydreams of science fiction that have (or promise to) become manifest in this, the real world.

Some of these innovations are kind of ludicrous and appropriately ridiculed by the authors as being good ways to loose your friends (but I still want one). Others reference truly remarkable inventions that we've known were coming, but are finally here and could drastically improve lives, such as this prosthetic arm from the maker of the Segway (video). And then a few talk about things that are just awesome, such as a tattoo that turns on and off, plays videos, makes phone calls, alerts you of health issues, and oh... is powered by your blood.

There are some incredible things out there, and i take it as my job to tell you all about them. Fortunately, sites like Engadget are doing all the hard work for me...

UPDATE 3/12: Once in a while, on days like today, Engadget's front page picks up a good article.