Tag Archives: Music

Reelr.tv – Turn Your Music Tweets Into A Live Broadcast

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Name: Reelr.tv
URL: http://www.reelr.tv

Reelr.tv is here to stack the odds higher than ever before as far as sharing music on Twitter goes. Users of this service (which was originally launched as MTweeV.com) can have all their music-related tweets turned into a live broadcast that everybody else can tune into.

Reelr.tv manages to do that by matching all the artists and songs that people are tweeting about to the YouTube videos that go with these. And using the service itself is kept really simple, as all one should do is to include a music-related hashtag (#nowPlaying) for tweets and videos to be matched. Continue reading →

Groovebug – Like Flipboard, But Only That For Music

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Name: Groovebug
URL: http://www.groovebug.com

Groovebug is based on a great idea, namely doing for music videos what Fipboard does for social network feeds. In case you’ve been locked in a cupboard for the last couple of months, Flipboard is an iPad app that can take care of collecting all the information that is otherwise distributed all over your favorite social sites, and have it presented as a magazine. This magazine can include everything from pictures to videos, and it can be flipped using the kind of hand gestures that make one feel like a character out of Star Trek.

Well, Groovebug does pretty much the same, but only that for the music you love. Groovebug takes a good look at your iTunes library, and then it uses what it finds there to assemble the pages of a magazine 100% suited to your tastes.

Groovebug is mainly powered by YouTube and The Echo Nest, with a custom aggregation engine also being used in order to retrieve these videos that are going to be displayed. The Echo Nest, incidentally, is one of the hottest new names around – it’s a music intelligence platform that is employed both by heavy-hitters like Spotify and Rdio. Continue reading →

The Bear Season (Uruguayan Independent Artist)

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The Bear Season: Ale Nario, Fela Magnani, Santiago de Souza, Dave Lazar, Manuel Curiel and Álvaro de León.

You know what? I’ve had it with these stuffy folks at Oxford. They’ve sold us a language that’s nowhere as limited as they’ve always claimed. They’ve shown us nothing but these sides of words they wanted us to see. Period. Take the verb “shock”, for instance. I’ve recently become aware such a verb isn’t as one-dimensional as they have told us all our lives. It’s dawned on me that it’s equally possible to be shocked positively and negatively, that you can be shocked both in good and in bad ways. Hesitant? Read on…

Definition of “something that shocked me in a bad way”: the day a friend gave me a copy of Anal Cunt’s “40 More Reasons to Hate Us” album as a birthday present, on the ostensible grounds that I love collecting rare CDs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, at around that time this wondrous friend had the chance to buy Led Zeppelin’s “Remasters” for the price of a single CD and add it to his personal collection, and he chose to buy a studio album by Wang Chung instead.
Despite the fact that I changed my address twice and that now I sleep ensconced in the middle of an underground labyrinth, I still have nightmares from time to time.

Definition of “something that shocked me in a good way”: the day I listened to The Bear Season’s debut EP (“Do It“) for the first time. Despite being Uruguayan, the guys sounded so Californian that I couldn’t help thinking if they had long blonde hair and big breasts then they’d be Athena Lundberg.
They’ve always been one of these bands I was more than eager to feature on MusicKO, but for some intricate reason or the other (like being busy listening to Pixie Lott’s debut album) I could never get around to doing it. Until now. Continue reading →

Songspin.fm – Discover And Share The Latest Sounds

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Name: Songspin
URL: http://www.songspin.fm

Songspin.fm is here to cater to all your music discovery needs. With its ability to let you pick a genre and produce a random tune after the other for you to go through, it does remind me a lot of Chatroulette. Only that Songspin.fm has no unsavory aspects to damage the overall experience of users (or to enhance it beyond belief – I guess both vantage points can hold true).

Rock, Pop, Metal, Indie, Dance, Electronic, Hip Hop, Rap… all these genres are already supported. You simply pick the one that makes you go all noddy, bang the “SPIN” button and squeeze your headphones with your mitts if you like what comes in. And if you don’t, then you simple hit “SPIN” again. Ease of use? Up there, with Odin and Thor.

And Songspin.fm also has a social dimension to it, for those who are really popular on sites like Facebook and Twitter. They can share the best selections that they come across when using the site, and start influencing their counterparts in a way not possible ever since Yahoo! insensitively pulled the plug on GeoCities.

MuseSpring – Educating A New Generation Of Industry Men

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Name: MuseSpring
URL: http://www.musespring.com

Poor record companies. They get such a lot of stick for having taken so long to adapt to the challenges posed by digital music that they all end up looking like grotesque villains.

Granted, most industry men moved slower than dead people at the onset of the digital era. They failed to do things when they should have done them. They lost money for themselves and for their clients (IE, these artists that we believe in so passionately). But what’s in the past is in the past. There’s no point in keeping on chastising the industry for all its previous errors. It would be much, much better to try and carry on using all the knowledge that was gained as a true point from which to move into the future. And that’s exactly what this young company is here for.

MuseSpring provides people with all the knowledge they could need to succeed in the music industry as we know it right now. The company offers a myriad of different online courses on its site, along with access to business services and corporate support. That should be enough to let any struggling company renew its strength. And those who are planning on launching a company of their very own are even given the chance to secure some funding through MuseSpring.com.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to a simple (and inescapable) fact – the music industry has changed, and the common practices of yesteryear now stands as nothing short of archaic. For companies, it’s time to start moving ahead or be left in the dust. Services like MuseSpring have got what it takes to point the way, and show those who understand the importance of moving with the times take one firm step after the other.

Restorm – Letting Bands License And Sell Their Music

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Name: Restorm
URL: http://www.restorm.com

Restorm is here to answer the prayers of all these bands that have had it with paying exorbitant fees to license their music online. This new platform has been created to put an end to that, and to allow musicians to license (and sell) their music to anybody, paying the lowest possible commission (only 10%).

Registration to this service is free, and bands can have their music and data imported from any other service they might already be using, so a profile is created in a flash. Oh, and the process can be sped up even more since one can sign in using his already existing Facebook profile. Continue reading →

JamCloud – Like Hangouts, But Strictly For Music Lovers

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Name: Jamcloud
URL: http://www.jamcloud.com

An application that is available internationally, JamCloud is here to let all of us play music and watch videos with all our friends in real time. No doubt inspired by the concept of Google Plus hangouts, JamCloud enables people in any corner of the world to create and join listening rooms for free. And the people who do convene in any of these rooms can not only listen to the music others are playing, but also communicate among themselves thanks to a built-in messaging tool.

What’s more, the music that is played in any room can be voted both positively and negatively. That should let people who land on any room which is mighty crowded figure out which music is worth a try, and which is not really worth the hassle.

Currently, JamCloud has a database of over 325 million songs and videos.

And support for services like YouTube, SoundCloud and Facebook means that it’s dead simple to have playlists and individual songs imported right into any room you have joined. It’s all done by clicking and dropping what you want to have shared with others into the relevant box

 

La Medio Siglo (Uruguayan Independent Artist)

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"Altos Con Rulos" By La Medio Siglo

It’s official: humankind is ending on the 15th of March, 2012, and the world will be left spinning like a loony balloon. Well, Facebook is going to bite the dust right there and then. Which for quite a handful of people is roughly the same thing. They won’t be able to spy on their exes, they won’t be able to insult others indirectly, they won’t be able to tag people in insalubrious pictures… they will have to learn to do without all that. Like my reclusive namesake in robes of white once wrote, “How dreary—Marbles—After playing Crown”.

Me? Since I’m a very balanced sort of fellow, and as calm as a fruit stand in New York, I won’t miss any of the things listed above. I will, however, miss befriending young bands there. My, the number of “musical” friends I’ve got easily offsets my “real life” friends. And my “real life friends” count seems to be dwindling, too. Last week, my two BFF (that’s “Best Friends Forever”, in case you don’t listen to Taylor Swift) said they were going to buy pizza, and they never came back! Sigh…

Well, I guess I’ll have to soldier on. And hold onto the remnants of the day, celebrating all these truly motivated bands I’m still getting to know through the Winklevoss twins’ main claim to fame. The most recent one is La Medio Siglo [The Half-Century], a Uruguayan unit that plays a very energetic mixture of rock and funk.

The band is made up of the communal mystique of Paul Higgs (guitar, vocals), Thomas Bate (guitar), Pablo Deferrari (bass) and Manuel Souto (drums), and its first EP has just been issued. It’s titled “Altos Con Rulos” [Tall And Curly], and it’s available for free on La Medio Siglo’s official website.

Leaving aside the title track (which is just a spirited way to start proceedings),
the EP has got four songs where teenage staples are articulated over music that is muscular and very well-written, with exciting dynamics and histrionics. I recall that the first time I chatted with Paul Higgs (the band’s guitarist and singer) my first remark upon listening to one of the cuts on the EP (which they were recording and mixing back then) was “Shit, you guys have got quite a swing!”. I actually said that aloud as I was typing the words down, and I swear I sounded as earnest as Samuel L. Jackson when he went “Snakes in the motherfuckin’ plane!”. Continue reading →

Nogeno – Free Pages For Artists

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Name: Nogeno
URL: http://www.nogeno.com

Nogeno is the latest site to be released that makes having a profile page where to promote your music an absolute piece of cake. Thanks to Nogeno, just any musician can have an active presence on the Internet, and include everything from a short bio to a calendar listing his every upcoming date. And all the songs he has recorded so far, of course. He can stream these online by way of the provided player, and also sell them for good money. Any musician who uses Nogeno can start generating a direct income, without A & R men getting in the way of what is rightfully his.

A Nogeno page can be created in a breeze, there’s just nothing technical to do or handle – such is the beauty of sites like this and Onesheet. All you have to do in order to get started is sign in using your Facebook account.

And note that if you already have a Bandcamp or a MySpace profile then you can have all your data imported into Nogeno, and be up and running within minutes. In no case will you have to pay anything – Nogeno is free, and (by the looks of it) will remain like that for good.

MPlayr – Listen To Music Charts On Your Browser

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Name: MPlayr
URL: http://www.mplayr.com

MPlayr is one of the best ways to stay abreast of what is being played on some of the most representative music charts the world over. On this site, you can tune into the US and the UK music charts, and learn what sounds are trending there. And I mean it – the site lets you do more than just read a list of songs ranking in either territory, it actually lets you listen to them online. That can be done directly on your browser. You won’t have to download anything, and you won’t have to pay anything either.

What’s more, the site has a chart devoted to iTunes. Again – you can see what’s hot in there, and listen to it straight in your browser.

Other meritorious aspects of MPlayr include letting people look up both new and old songs and have them played on the fly, and letting users create playlists they can then share with all their friends on Facebook (the one service which is used for signing in). Continue reading →