Shedding some light on Dark Mean - i(heart)music Dark Mean really need to let other people name things for them. I mean, their first EP was called Frankencottage . Their second EP, Music Box , may seem like an improvement, if a little generic...until you actually check the tracklisting, and discover that three of the four songs -- "Acoustic", "Piano & Beat" and "Dark Banjo" -- are named for the music featured within them. Thankfully the band's nomenclature-related flaws don't spill over into their music.
2009 Will Be a Year of Panic Illustration by Joe Kloc I’m always impressed by people’s behavior during massive panics. They rarely believe or admit that they are panicked. Yip yippee - i(heart)music All afternoon I was trying to come up with some way of describing Jasper Sloan Yip that didn't include Dave Matthews, Jason Mraz, John Mayer and The Mellow Show . After all, as much mainstream popularity as those artists have (and, to be honest, as much as I enjoy three of those four things), it seemed to me that invoking any of them would guarantee a fair number of readers would just instantly skip over the rest of the review, regardless of how glowing it might be -- not exactly a desirable outcome since, as far as I'm concerned, his newest album, Every Day and All at Once , deserves to be heard by a wide audience. Around my fifth or sixth listen, though, I came to two realizations.
Easy Backup and Restore of TweetDeck One of my favorite applications for Twitter is TweetDeck. TweetDeck comes as close to my idea of the Ultimate Twitter Client as there is. It lets me set up groups and watch keywords and arrange a sort of dashboard to keep track of everything. The main downside to this is if something goes wrong. iPhone Users Can Now Get Their Music in the Cloud With mSpot Finally, iPhone and iPod touch users can access their music from the cloud. The mSpot cloud music service goes live today, offering iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Mac/PC users the ability to upload up to 2GB of their music collections for free, and listen to that music anywhere. The mSpot music service is almost identical to the Android version released in June, offering a smartphone app with a choice between live streaming and "airplane mode," in which selected songs are pre-downloaded to the user's player for playback when an Internet connection isn't available. As users add music to their Macs or PCs, mSpot's desktop application automatically syncs the songs with the mSpot service.
Is the unique visitor an endangered species? Duh Metrics matter. Every online publisher and every digital marketer knows this. In a new article, BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy asks the question: is the 'unique user' metric an endangered species? Before I answer this question, a disclaimer: I'm not a fan of Lacy. Her hyping of Web 2.0 followed by her newfound skepticism as the hype has subsided leads me to one conclusion - she's a part of the herd, not an observer of it, as a good journalist should be. Sam Shalabi: compositions across continents An Arabic version of this article was published in the Beirut-based Al Adab cultural journal. Weaving together diverse musical traditions that span oceans, Montreal-based composer and musician Sam Shalabi offers a distinctive sound, rooted in contemporary musical experimentation but also inspired by the popular orchestras that took a cultural center stage in Egypt in the late 1960s. Impressive in scope, Land of Kush, the latest music ensemble project orchestrated by Shalabi, explores new musical boundaries while combining artistic practice from the Middle East and North America.
Tuesday Tracks! Bishop Morocco, Land of Talk, Hawksley Workman : This Magazine Blog // Canadian progressive politics, environment, art, culture // Subscribe today Elizabeth Powell, lead singer for Land of Talk In this week’s edition of Tuesday Tracks we’ll take a look at a group of modern new wavers, one of the country’s best kept secrets and a wild video from a true eccentric. Sometimes sifting through the web for new music can be an arduous task. There’s just so much, but other times the songs really find you. Such is the case this week.
Microsoft readies smartphone assault on Apple Microsoft is gearing up to take on rival Apple in the smartphone market. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Microsoft is getting ready to launch an online marketplace akin to Apple's App Store. In August, Microsoft had started looking for people to head up the new application store.