Category: Music

Spotify Free – Review

I am a person who has a large collection of both CD’s and digital music, so when I heard about the new form of listening to music digitally, being able to stream songs over an Internet connection, I quickly decided to see just how great it might be.  Since I have started using it last month, my current favorite streaming service is Spotify. There are other streaming music services that I have tried namely, Pandora, Grooveshark and the free 7 day trial of Rdio.  I have also uploaded some of my digital songs to Google Music and Amazon’s cloud storage service.

Pandora, one of the first streaming music services available, allows users to create playlists based on their favorite artists or songs.  Once this has been done, Pandora will then populate the playlists using their music catalogue.  The user is allowed to skip up to six Pandora chosen songs per hour.  Also,audio advertisements are played at the end of a string of songs.  Of course there is a paid version which takes away the skip limit and ads.  If you use a smartphone, there are apps for Android and iOS as well as a mobile version of the website.

Grooveshark is a different sort of streaming music website. It is user driven, meaning that users can search for and upload their own music.  Since music is being uploaded by other users, I am not too sure how legal this is, but the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has yet to shut it down like it did to the similar site Seeqpod.

Rdio is very similar to Spotify, except that its free version is only a 7 day trial.  Also, it might have a different record label deal, so the music it has could differ from Spotify. There is a web version as well as Apps for various Smartphone OS’s.

Amazon cloud storage and Google Music are completely different sorts of streaming services.  Instead of getting deals with the record labels to stream their catalogues, Amazon and Google decided to let users upload their existing music collections to the cloud so they could play songs on any computer or smartphone that has an Internet collection.  Amazon gives users 5 GB of free storage to upload not only music, but photos, documents and videos. Google on the other hand let’s users upload 20,000 songs for free.

Those services are great in there own respects, but I was eager to try out the new service that had just become available in the United States on July 14th, after having been accessible to Europeans since October 2008, this service is Spotify.  There are three levels of service for this streaming music platform.  You can be cheap like me, get the free ad supported version, pay $4.99 a month and have unlimited ad-free music listening using the desktop client or pay $9.99 per month to have this access on your smart phone as well .  I have only tried the free, ad supported desktop client. To get a Spotify invite can need to be sent one by someone who is using one of the paid versions of the service.

I was eager to try this service as soon as I got my elusive invite.  My goal was to see if I would be able to find music from my favorite artists and genres that the music that had been licensed from the major record labels, Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal as well as many other indie labels.  As I began searching around for certain artists, I discovered just how vast the licensing deals had been to get this large catalogue of music.

Of course with every thing there are the aspects that take the fun, enjoyment, ease of use and convince out of using the service.  There are two main issues I have with the service, but one of them is to be mostly forgiven since I am using the free ad-supported version.

The first semi-gripe is that when searching for music, there were some artists and albums I was unable to find.  These artists are ones that are on small indie labels and it’s to be expected that they might not be included in the record label deals.  Another, is that there are several movie soundtracks that I would like to listen to that are missing. It’s still amazing what they do have, but when I searched for an artist such as Hall & Oats, they only had their early albums and not their most popular stuff.  The second issue is that there are ads that play at unwanted times after a song has just finished.  These can range from spots for the paid version of the service to plugs for other artists.

The worst is when you just finished listening to a great song and then an ad starts playing which is a portion of a song from an artist that you would never ever associate with the styles and genres of music you like and are currently listening to. All you can do is lower the volume. The ad has to completely finish before you can listen to the next song.  As I was reading about the service in Europe before it came to the USA,I found out that instead of ads, these folks were only allowed a maximum number of plays per song in a single month.  I am glad that is not the case with the free version here in the US.

After having used the service since mid July, at the free level, I am more than satisfied with what I am getting in return.  To me this is leaps and bounds over what I have previously tried.  Just don’t expect Spotify to have every song ever recorded in the last 150 years, but what it was able to license from the record labels is impressive.  I suggest checking out the free version where you can sample different music before you decide to by it through itunes or on CD, exposing yourself to artists you might never have ever listened to before.  Other than those small nitpicks, I would fully recommend Spotify to any music lover wanting to find new music or just looking to listen to vast amount of music they wish they could own.

Coldplay Announce Fifth Studio Album

Britpop all-stars Coldplay have announced their fifth studio album, called Mylo Xyloto.

What you’re looking at is the reversible cover art for the album (pronounced MY-lo ZY-latoe), and it will have a target release date on October 24th (Oct. 25th in the U.S.).

According to the official release statement from the band, “Mylo Xyloto was produced by Markus Dravs, Daniel Green and Rik Simpson, with enoxification and additional composition by Brian Eno. The album will be released in digital, CD and vinyl formats. A special limited edition Pop-Up Album version will also be available, which will include a 12″ x 12″ hardback book containing graffiti pop-up art designed by David A. Carter, vinyl, CD and exclusive content including photographs, excerpts from the studio diary and the band’s personal notebooks.”

Coldplay will also release a new single from the album, “Paradise,” on September 12th.

Stay tuned for more news regarding Mylo Xyloto in the coming months before its release. You can check out the single “Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall” down below.

Jay-Z & Kanye West – Watch The Throne Review

When rap moguls Jay-Z and Kanye West announced that they were going to collaborate on a new record, you could feel the Earth rumble. The music community had every reason to jump for joy: Jay-Z had major success creating some of rap’s most memorable albums of the past decade, and Kanye West had been on a continual high since the release of his most recent critically acclaimed LP, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Perhaps the two biggest names in rap were about to join forces (as artists, not just as producers) and those of us who appreciated their works separately were now going to have their minds explode. But enough with how we felt before “The Throne” got together (that’s what they’re collectively called). What matters is that their release, Watch The Throne, is now available for us to see which one raps better, right?

Just to set the record straight, there is no question of who raps better here. While each track gives breathing room for each rapper to lay down a verse, this is not really a sparring event. That’s something left for fans to do when they play their albums side-by-side. If anything, Watch The Throne lets friends and partners try to find a unified vision, because really, what do these guys have to prove to one another? They’re arguably the hottest commodities of the rap community and the music community in general, and it should be worth celebrating…right?

Well, maybe it would be more accurate to find out who is really celebrating: the music community or Jay-Z and West themselves. The finished result of what took months of teasing and featuring guests is a rocky one, containing tracks that shine like its album art and obscure like its questionable gimmickry – by that I mean, is there really a reason why these two are making music together? There are many moments on here when you feel their collaboration is for the purposes of self-indulgence, referring to the idea that these two rappers really are royalty and then throwing it upon the listener. I’m not quite sure  that actually makes for great rap itself, a genre that hits hard when it plays hard and intricately applies lyrics to topics with some more humanistic significance. Here it’s just lyrically unimpressive, which is probably the biggest letdown, considering how well these guys do on their own turf.

However, for what it’s worth, Watch The Throne is more or less an admirable experiment, bouncing between musically superb examples of the craft and not-so-great tunes that some might consider even besting some of today’s Top 40. Those superb tracks mentioned, such as “Gotta Have It,” “New Day” and “Murder to Excellence” really shoot for inspired beats that sound very much in Jay-Z and West’s ballpark, bringing the best of their abilities together into a formative mold. That isn’t to say the rest of the album doesn’t do the same justice, but they come off more as the glaze than the mold itself. In fact, tracks featuring guests like up-and-comer Frank Ocean, Jay-Z’s beau Beyoncé and Mr. Hudson are the most overcooked tracks on here, providing so much excess that it ends up leaving little to desire.

By the end of the album, you leave with more questions than answers about this supposed dynamic duo, which doesn’t exactly make this the most impressive rap record of the year as most of us probably assumed it was going to be. Maybe questions are more important when it comes to an experiment like Watch The Throne, which can still pull off the few great songs mentioned, making this an admirable effort from artists who do know what they’re doing given the right ingredients. Having said that, however, the intention of giving power to “The Throne” as a sense for lyricism and marketability is lazy and most disappointing, but some tracks really do bring interesting beats to the table. If you have to have your fill of Jay-Z and/or Kanye West, then there is plenty here to put on your plate, but as someone expecting “two heads are better than one,” I don’t think the tracks not mentioned here are worth having seconds.

Tell us what you think of the album in the comments below and check out Watch The Throne, available now on iTunes and everywhere else on August 12th from Roc-A-Fella Records. (A “Deluxe Edition” is also available through iTunes, featuring four additional tracks including “H.A.M.” and “The Joy” feat. Curtis Mayfield)

Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs Deluxe Edition Now Available

The way The Suburbs was meant to be.

Time has been nice to Arcade Fire. The Canadian indie rockers had a massive year with the release of their third LP, The Suburbs, capping it off with a worldwide tour in support of the album and then taking the music industry by storm, earning the top honor of “Album of the Year” at last year’s Grammy’s. It’s a remarkable album no doubt, and considering the major success that is The Suburbs, the band has now released a deluxe edition exactly one year from its original release to help continue the festivities.

This new 2-disc deluxe edition features the album’s original 16-track tracklist plus two previously unreleased bonus tracks entitled “Culture War” and “Speaking In Tongues” featuring none other than new waver David Byrne, along with an extended version of “Wasted Hours.” Accompanying the release is an 80-page booklet featuring unreleased artwork from the band’s recording sessions and marketing photo shoots.

Also included in the set is a DVD featuring Spike Jonze-directed short film, “Scenes from The Suburbs,” a Behind-the-Scenes look at the making of the short film, and the music video for the single “The Suburbs,” also directed by Spike Jonze.

For those of you who already own The Suburbs, you can easily purchase these additional features digitally via iTunes. For those of you who have yet to pick up this album or are a huge Arcade Fire fan like I am, here is your chance to grab the full package as it was intended.

You can check out the music video to “The Suburbs” down below and be sure to check out The Suburbs Deluxe Edition, now available from Merge Records.