Looking for new music?
polycounter lvl 19
Recently I've grown really tired of my 6000+ mp3 collection. It was depressing at first to think about, how the songs I've listened to for the past 7 or 8 years has tired out. I still love all that music, but I was looking for something.. new.
That's when my buddy Andrew recommended The Hype Machine. It's a website that monitors a lot of blogs to see what people are blogging about and displays it on their site, where you can also listen to that full song AND rate it (ala Digg.com method). The 'popular' page is generally where I go every day now, since every 3 days its an entirely new set of songs to keep things fresh.
The site has everything from Top-40, Hip-hop, country, rock, rockabilly, etc. etc. and remixes or mash-ups of everything in-between.
To top it all off, if you click on the "Read more" of each song posting, it'll link you to the specific blog post its feeding from where you can most certainly find the MP3 linked directly for download.
I've also been using the dashboard option quite a bit. It catalogues the songs you've favourited so you can listen to them in a convenient play list.
Anyway, pretty cool site. Thought I'd share.
Replies
Uh.. I mean, I'll check it out.. :shifty:
Recently got my ipod nicked, and hadnt put a lot of my music back onto my PC after a format, so this is great.
so many new shit comes out everyday that i cant be bothered to listen.
thats why i keep coming to my old stuff that i know taht i will always like and enjoy.
most new stuff is like bubblegum, i chew a little then i trhow it away.
most perfect stuff i have is from the 90's
Me too. LOVE that site.
Crazy thing though.
A few years ago I ran my current faves: NIN-Rammstein-KMFDM, and came across a few songs by a band which I enjoyed..... which by TOTAL random fluke was fronted by my current Production Manager.
I have a grand total of 33,000 emulated music files; SID, NSF and SPC (C64, NES and SNES). Some files are songs, some are complete game soundtracks crammed into one file. And still, that's only 216 MB of chiptune music. Actually, I have no mp3s on my current main drive... Well, aside from some C64 remixes that is.
"Regular" music just gets old so fast, you know?
It's a hell of a lot more rewarding than putting a combination of your favourite bands into Google or MySpace with 'sounds like' as a prefix. Although I admit I've found a lot of new acts that I like just by skimming through the 'customers who bought this also bought' section on Amazon.
Not meaning to sound like a music snob with this post, just pointing out non-digital routes
Oh, and Rox, define 'regular' music. Because unless you're talking about John Cage, Throbbing Gristle or generally any of the avant garde side of things, music is just music. Yes, even Chiptune, it's just played with a different instrument.
Now made by a music snob, which sort of defeats the point, but I'll take what I can get.
Another good way of finding good music is flipping through the liner notes of your favourite records. Check out the 'Thanks to' section, the producer, engineer, additional musicians, etc. and find out what other projects they've been involved in.
My main point with this is that FINDING music is, to me at least, one of the most rewarding things you can do. If you have a service that hands it to you on a plate, particularly in the digital domain, its unlikely that you will be able to develop a long-lasting 'relationship' with that music. Its just another set of files on your hard drive that you listen to as a distraction occasionally.
The more investment you put into finding that music, the more you'll appreciate it when you find that thing that sends shivers down your spine and makes you go 'fuck, where has this been all my life?'. But then maybe thats just the relationship that I have with music in general. A lot of people seem to regard it as some sort of audio wallpaper these days.
[Edit:] Case in point with the finding music thing. A friend of mine with an encyclopedic knowledge of music had been bugging me about listening to this band that he was raving about. I ignored it for the most part, as his tastes can quite often be described as exotically weird, which didn't suit my headspace at the time. When I finally got round to listening to the band in question, my head lit up and I thought "Damn. *This* is what I've been looking for to fill *that* particular gap in my head". Open your mind to new ideas and new things. I'm looking at you, Rox.
Thus the quotation marks. I mean what people who aren't like me would call music. The people that listen to 80's game music and say, "What? That's not music."
By regular music, I generally mean things involving lyrics. Pop music, in the broadest definition of the word. That's not saying I don't like it, I've listened to a hell lot of Travis and Machinae Supremacy lately, for example... along with the adorable 40's stuff featured in Fallout 3. But I've found music generally meant to be background music and nothing else makes it much easier for me to focus on what I'm doing, or in some situations, focus less and just zone out. C64 music in particular makes for excellent work music, as many of the songs don't even end at all. On occations, I've listened to the same one song for some time, and by the time I actually realize it's been going on for a while and stats to annoy me a little, it's been over an hour.
Hey, I never said what I don't listen to, which is pretty much nothing. I've even tapped into some classical stuff and enjoyed it greately. The last time, it was several of Chopin's works. I listened to his stuff exclusively for a whole day. But again, with an almost endless library of C64 stuff, it's easily what I listen to the most, percentually. I just wish there was an mp3 player I could stick Winamp plugins into...
If you like classical stuff, have a listen to The Divine Comedy. They're a bit love-em-or-hate-em (personally I think the dudes a musical genius, but hey, thats just me), kinda what you could call classically-orientated pop. Some of it's really nice. Some of it is required listening just for the madness of it ("Booklovers" for example), and sometimes it verges into stuff that Radiohead *wished* they could write ("Dumb It Down" being a good example of that). But a lot of the time it's just gorgeous, lush classically themed music with wonderful singing and lyrics.