Piracy: The Better Choice ™
You know it’s true 
Archive for December, 2006
I hate mix tapes
Ipods and other digital music players are great, because they bring your music collection to the digital age. But they’ll never kill radio, as some people suggest. Why? Because people, like me, are lazy.
We want others to tell us what’s new or what’s good, so don’t have to always make mixes and playlists or constantly fiddle with our music players to find a good song. I would rather listen to a station that plays the kind of genre I like and have them decide what makes a good mix. That’s where radio comes in. However traditional radio has always been ad-infested and too mainstream, sticking to the 80-20 rule like white on rice.
Things are starting to change, though. Services like XM and Sirius have been great, and one could call them the next logical step in the evolution of radio. You can now listen to niche stations that would have never made it to traditional “mainstream” broadcast, thereby starting to break the 80-20 rule. However, the 80-20 hasn’t been eliminated, it’s been merely shifted down to individual stations. Go find the 80’s radio station, and you’ll find that the station will still play the more “popular” 80’s tracks.
What if you controlled exactly what kind of music you wanted to listen to? Internet radio, which used to just be like satellite radio, is starting to harness the social part of the net. Free services like Pandora and Last.fm let you provide artists or songs you like and they will compile a personalized playlist just for you, by analyzing the characteristics of your preferred music and by what other people with similar tastes are listening to. On Last.fm, you can even mark other users as friends and it’ll keep track of what they are listening to! It just doesn’t get any better than that, people. Go check them out:
Afternoon YouTubin’
Ahhh, nothing like a crazy man dancing at Best Buy. He just keeps getting better and better!
‘Studio 60′ Christmas Song available for free
So, I know I haven’t posted in a while, and I really should be posting about life updates, but AOL is in layoff mode today and I thought I’d share this mp3 link.
If you don’t watch NBC’s Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, you should. It’s a great show, great dialogue and meaningful plot-lines. Anyway, in their last (Christmas episode) before going on break was a rendition of ‘O Holy Night’ by some Hurricane Katrina survivors. It turns out that the characters on the show were played by actual musicians who survived Katrina and NBC coordinated with the Tiptina’s Foundation to get the performance on the show. Well, the awesome rendition is available for free from NBC. Get it while it’s hot!