Before I leave town for a few weeks (pity me, I'll be in Hawaii), I figured I should leave you all with something to read. Here you go!
- Fingertips Music has an interesting essay about the "social music fallacy." I think the author makes a great point: sharing music is meaningful when it's done between friends with common musical interests; it's spam when you're simply seeing what everyone's listening to in your Facebook feed.
- For those of you who disagree with the above article and are ready to start sharing your every listen on Facebook, check out evolver.fm's "Beginner's Guide To Facebook Music." I don't really like Facebook's branding of this - this isn't "Facebook Music" so much as "Facebook updates about music to which people are listening through other platforms." Still, this is a good guide if you want to have your FB friends list appear in Spotify, but don't want to share every damn track you listen to.
- Speaking of evolver.fm, they have a good writeup of the new metadata-driven music app Drinkify, which promises to help users decide what to drink based on what they're currently listening to. (Apparently a neat Hendricks Gin with pickled carrot garnish would be the perfect complement to this Youth Lagoon album I'm listening to as I write this. Sounds right to me.)
- Drinkify was only one interesting app to come out of a recent Music Hack Day in Boston. Check out the Echo Nest's roundup of the hackage, and be sure to play around with the "Bohemian Rhapsichord" (Chrome only), a crazy little app that lets you play and combine samples from "Bohemian Rhapsody" to create something entirely new.
- Music Hack Days are great for getting ideas off the ground, but of course it's once they really take flight that things get interesting. Public media stalwarts KCRW & PRX have created a high-flying iPad app called "Music Mine" which represents "an ambitious bid to improve the experience of music discovery online." Anyone want to buy me an iPad so I can write a review?
- And finally, if (like me) you're in need of a new pair of headphones to wear while you play with all this great music stuff, check out Gizmodo's guide to the best budget headphones (helpful when gift-shopping for your local music/tech blogger!).
