Tag Archives: Music

Merry Tuba Christmas

Lots of tubas. The St. Louis Galleria. Christmas music.

Most People Still Want to Own Their Music

Digital Music News:

Yes, still: According to a study just concluded by eMusic, music fans overwhelmingly prefer ownership over streaming, by a drastic margin. That is, 92% prefer ownership of music over any other method, with unlimited playback and security of collections cited as top reasons.

[…]

Also encouraging for the likes of Spotify, MOG, and Rdio: modest amount in both camps (14% and 15%, respectively) indicated that they would pay for streaming access in the future.  But more than 40% expressed interest in cloud-based storage of the music they own, a nice nod to incoming giants like Amazon, Google, and Apple.

Still think it’s a mistake for Apple to not be going after streaming music memberships? This seems to indicate that iTunes Match is the right direction, at least for now.

For myself, I still buy CDs. I get the physical media, a higher quality, and I can rip it for my digital collection—in lossless.

I also wonder what this portends for streaming services like Netflix and if the numbers are any better for movies.

VidRhythm

If you read what I write, you are no doubt familiar with the fact that I very much like the work Harmonix does.

VidRhythm is their newest release on iOS, and it’s a fun little toy. Here’s a clip I made in the car earlier today with the kids:

And another I made just now with the two older ones:

It’s two bucks on the App Store. This app needs more Automattician-made videos.

Maroon 5 Pack 02

Good sight-reads (includes one track that was released in the first pack but I hadn’t cleared in RB3 yet). :) Chord-heavy, but generally fun to play and some decent challenge in there with the patterns.

Maroon 5 is one of those bands I enjoy listening to for reasons that aren’t quite clear even to me. I was happy to see some more tracks in the Music Store.

Howie Day: “Ghost”

There is some absolutely sick layering pedal work in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iL2hTdm6V0

Howie Day is the perfect example of a singer-songwriter who was completely ruined by his management, collaborators, or by the label (I’m not sure which). His best work is solo; putting him with a full band on tour and over-producing his albums were both really, really bad decisions.

If you don’t mind working with Shorten files, there’s a great recording of one of his shows from 2002 available (legally) here.

“Love Is a Battlefield” (And a Pleasant Rock Band Surprise)

A couple of weeks ago I picked up the Pat Benatar pack for Rock Band, mostly out of curiosity. Last night I played “Love Is a Battlefield” for the first time and found it to be a lot more fun than I was expecting. I suppose I hadn’t listened to what the guitar was doing in the background before.

I did 95% on sightread, which was good enough for 1,496th on the leaderboard.

It’s not the best Benatar on Rock Band, though; that honor goes to “Heartbreaker.”

My Rock Band activity page is here, by the way. I really wish Harmonix provided RSS feeds or another way to ingest this information elsewhere. I turned on the Facebook integration today, but I prefer to bring this stuff into my own site where I can control it.