Reading Roundup

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!).

Happy reading/listening, and I'll see you all in December.

Reading Roundup

Yay, it's time for another news roundup!  I just got back from a few weeks out of town (apparently the universe did not like the fact that I was out of New York, and decided to get all pouty and start throwing around earthquakes and hurricanes - hopefully now that I'm back, things will settle down considerably).

Anyway, here's what's been happening lately in the digital music world:

• Not content to own all of our private data, Facebook is launching a music platform in conjunction with Spotify, MOG, and Rdio.  It will apparently allow users "to listen to music from within Facebook.com," since it's not convenient enough to simply have music on in the background while you spend all day on Facebook.  Interestingly enough, a Facebook rep apparently told Mashable “There’s nothing new to announce,” so take this one with a grain of salt.
  
  
• eMusic and The Echo Nest have teamed up to create a new streaming radio offering.  It's an interesting mix of human-curated content (by the music nerds at eMusic) and computer-based playlist generation (by the tech nerds at The Echo Nest).  If, like me, you feel that Brooklyn has been woefully under-represented in the musical arena, you might want to start with their Brooklyn station.
  
  
• The Atlantic has an interesting piece on The Loudness Wars and how they might possibly be over.  Let your eardrums rejoice!  The piece has an interesting take on Sleigh Bells' use of extreme compression as a purposeful technique as opposed to a last resort to make a record sound louder than it really is.
  
  
• Not really news, but a useful roundup of Spotify playlist tools that help you create, discover, share, and collaborate on Spotify playlists.  Enjoy them now before they implement streaming caps in the US!
  
  
• If you're feeling generous, take a look at all the cool SXSW Interactive 2012 panels that Echo Nest is proposing, and go sign up and vote for them!  While you're at it, you might as well go ahead and vote for my panel, "Change Happens: Improv For An Unpredictable World."  Thanks!

That's all for today, folks.  Got any cool music-related news?  Let me know in the comments.