13. March 2007
You are 17.35 % Mainstream!
Crap! Looks like I am less alternative than I thought. :)
With the Last.fm-Mainstream-O-Meter, users of Last.fm (see “Discovering Music that You Like“) can see, how much their listening habits overlap with the evil mainstream. You only have to enter your Last.fm username and the webservice calculates - somehow - your mainstream factor in percent.
6. August 2006
Music is great. Music is manifold. Everyone has his own taste of music. What is loved by one might be refused by the next.
These different preferences make it pretty difficult to find new great music. The spectrum is - fortunately - large, but finding the music that appeals to you personally turns out to be like the search for the needle in the haystack.
Several internet services have lined up to help easing your search - time to give you an overview of the most important services of their kind.
Besides all this fancy new technology, you should not forget those primitive methods to find great new music. You can still ask friends for recommendations, listen in your record store to an unknown CD because it has an interesting name or simply looks pretty. The success rates of these “analog” techniques are surprisingly high.
Similar to Last.fm, Pandora is a personalized radio system, but without community features. It does not use a separate player application, but a Flash player on its homepage.
Gnoosic, Last.fm and Pandora work with a wide spectrum of music, including that controlled by the music industry. iRATE, on the contrary, has a different philosophy. It only plays free music.
Last.fm calls itself a personalized radio. That expression fits Last.fm pretty well.
To receive this radio, you have to install a small application. This application receives the music directly from Last.fm’s servers. The system keeps track of the music that you are listening to - if you wish even when you’re using other software like Winamp. You can also mark tracks from the radio that you love or never want to hear again.
liveplasma is another music map application. It is flash-based and looks prettier than Gnod’s music map.
Unfortunately, it liveplasma does not know much about less popular bands. This can become very frustrating if your listening preferences aren’t very mainstream… especially because liveplasma displays Madonna’s music map each time it doesn’t find the artist you really want to see mapped.
The music coverage is especially bad in foreign languages. I have yet to find a German band in Liveplasma. Even German groups which are considered mainstream are not available.
For the bands it knows, it is a good looking tool to browse around in the musical universe.
8. March 2006
There is some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy behind the success of popular music.
Popular music gets more attention. More people talk about it, it is played more often and is listed in charts. All this means free advertising. More people get in contact with popular music, so more people who might like it get to know about it, so it gets even more popular. But that does not seem to be all.
6. March 2006
A good pianist and a good singer - that’s all you need to make really good music.
Such a outstanding pianist (Ernst Horn) and a singer with a wonderful deep voice (Alexander) are “Deine Lakaien”. Usually, their music has a strong electronic touch, but there also is an unplugged album called “Acoustic”. No matter if electronic or acoustic, the music of Deine Lakaien is always unusual and dark.
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