Music Rec
Getting pumped!
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Thu, 02/02/2012 - 22:22
Getting pumped!
Categories: Music Rec
The Midem Music Machine
Music Machinery - Paul Lamere - Echonest - Mon, 01/30/2012 - 08:47
Just a quick post before it is demo time. This weekend at MIDEM Hack Day, I teamed up this weekend with the famous Mr. Doob to build a music hack. We created the Midem Music Machine. It creates a beautiful visualization of music using The Echo Nest analyzer and Three.js. Here’s a pic:
As you can see, our hack was inspired by the Animusic folks. Working with Mr. Doob was awesome. He did just amazing stuff.
You can see the Midem Music Machine online here: Midem Music Machine. You’ll need a browser that supports WebGL like Chrome.
Categories: Music Rec
I FOUND ICE CUBES 'GOOD DAY'
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Fri, 01/27/2012 - 23:10
CLUE 1:
“went to short dogs house,
they was watching Yo MTV
RAPS”
Yo MTV RAPS first aired:
Aug 6th 1988
CLUE 2:
Ice Cubes single “today was a good day” released on:
Feb 23 1993
CLUE 3:
”The Lakers beat the Super
Sonics”
Dates between Yo MTV Raps air date AUGUST 6 1988 and the release of the single FEBRUARY 23 1993 where the Lakers beat the Super Sonics:
Nov 11 1988 114-103
Nov 30 1988 110-106
Apr 4 1989 115-97
Apr 23 1989 121-117
Jan 17 1990 100-90
Feb 28 1990 112-107
Mar 25 1990 116-94
Apr 17 1990 102-101
Jan 18 1991 105-96
Mar 24 1991 113-96
Apr 21 1991 103-100
Jan 20 1992 116-110
CLUE 4:
Dates of those Laker wins over SuperSonics where it was a clear day with no Smog:
Nov 30 1988
Apr 4 1989
Jan 18 1991
Jan 20 1992
CLUE 5:
“Got a beep from Kim, and
she can fuck all night”
beepers weren’t adopted by mobile phone companies until the 1990s. Dates left where mobile beepers were availible to public:
Jan 18 1991
Jan 20 1992
CLUE 6:
Ice Cube starred in the film “Boyz in the hood” that released late Summer of 1991, but was being filmed mid-late 1990 early 1991 and Ice Cube was busy on set filming the movie Jan 18 1991 too busy to be lounging around the streets with no plans. Ladies and Gentlemen..
The ONLY day where:
Yo MTV Raps was on air
It was a clear and smogless day
Beepers were commercially sold
Lakers beat the SuperSonics
and Ice Cube had no events to attend was…
JANUARY 20 1992
National Good Day Day
-Donovan
Categories: Music Rec
jessicaivypage: Just another day in the office playing...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Thu, 01/26/2012 - 19:34
Just another day in the office playing chocolate covered rasin basketball. Dan Kantor ftw!
Categories: Music Rec
Come party with us
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Wed, 01/25/2012 - 20:23
Please join us for a very special celebratory Groundhog Day night of music with two of our favorite Album of the Week picks, Snowmine and Spanish Prisoners.
Brooklyn local Field Mouse and Academy Award nominated artist Ben Lear will be performing, too, making this is one helluva lineup you won’t want to miss.
@Pianos158 Ludlow St | New York, NY
Doors at 8:00 pm | Thursday February 2, 2012
Tickets $8 (all proceeds to artists) | 21+
Buy tickets here and rsvp. We can’t wait to see you and cheers to the little groundhog not seeing his shadow!
Categories: Music Rec
The clean desk award
Music Machinery - Paul Lamere - Echonest - Wed, 01/25/2012 - 13:40
We’ve doubled our floor space here at the Echo Nest. I now have an office with a door and a window that opens. Look at that desk. I’ll be winning the clean desk award every day for the next week at least!
Categories: Music Rec
Who is the A$%#hole?
Music Machinery - Paul Lamere - Echonest - Mon, 01/23/2012 - 15:28
In his blog post Can we kill the music business too? James from songspin.fm has the magic formula to kill the major labels. He says:
In a nutshell, to kill the major label run music industry, startups will need to:
- find great music from people who aren’t assholes
- let people do cool things with that music
- let users share what they create
- profit!
(Note that in that last quote, the first ‘sue’ link points to Grooveshark)
James is certainly right – you can’t have a great music startup without great music, but he goes off the rails if he thinks that companies protecting themselves from theft infringement are assholes. A music startup, or any business should not be able to build a business on top of someone else’s IP without compensating them for the use. It is easy to build a company that makes money by giving away someone else’s property. But it is not legal. For some insight on how things work at Grooveshark, read this thread on Digital Music News about how King Crimson tried to get their music taken off of Grooveshark. Included in the comment thread is this tasty bit by an individual who claims to work for Grooveshark that describes how they ’enhance’ the Grooveshark music library:We are assigned a predetermined amount of weekly uploads to the system and get a small extra bonus if we manage to go above that (not easy).The assignments are assumed as direct orders from the top to the bottom, we don’t just volunteer to “enhance” the Grooveshark database.
All search results are monitored and when something is tagged as “not available”, it get’s queued up to our lists for upload. You have to visualize the database in two general sections: “known” stuff and “undiscovered/indie/underground”. The “known” stuff is taken care internally by uploads. Only for the “undiscovered” stuff are the users involved as explained in some posts above. Practically speaking, there is not much need for users to upload a major label album since we already take care of this on a daily basis.
Are the above legal, or ethical? Of course not. Don’t reply to give me a lecture. I know. But if the labels and their lawyers can’t figure out how to stop it, then I don’t feel bad for having a job. It’s tough times.
Why am I disclosing all this? Well, I have been here a while and I don’t like the attitude that the administration has acquired against the artists. They are the enemy. They are the threat. The things that are said internally about them would make you very very angry. Interns are promised getting a foot in the music industry, only to hear these people cursing and bad mouthing the whole industry all day long, to the point where you wonder what would happen if Grooveshark get’s hacked by Anonymous one day and all the emails leak on some torrent or something.
James may be right – that a big part of the future of music is letting developers do cool things with music, but holding up Grooveshark as an example of a music startup is a mistake. What Grooveshark is doing isn’t cool. It isn’t something that developers should emulate. James called those that sue Grooveshark assholes, but from my vantage point he got it exactly ass-backwards.
Categories: Music Rec
Phil goes viral.
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Fri, 01/20/2012 - 23:24
Phil goes viral.
Categories: Music Rec
SOPA/PIPA and the future of the open web
Hypem - Wed, 01/18/2012 - 17:31
We’re joining our friends at Reddit, Tumblr, Wikipedia, Boing Boing, and Google today in raising awareness of SOPA/PIPA legislation in the US Congress. These bills aim to change the very structure of the internet by allowing corporations and the US government to block access to domain names, and they circumvent the DMCA provisions that have made innovation possible on the web. This includes the Hype Machine, and we stand with the 1000+ tech companies, engineers, and public advocacy groups that have spoken out against the proposed laws.
A vote on PIPA is scheduled for January 24. Read Joi Ito’s great, concise explanation of why SOPA/PIPA must not be allowed to pass, sign the petition, call your representatives, and urge them not to censor the internet.
Categories: Music Rec
Building Best of 2011
Last.fm - Mon, 01/16/2012 - 11:56
Earlier this week we released our Best of 2011 charts. 2011 saw you spend over 71 thousand years listening to music and scrobble more than 11 billion tracks. We’ve been churning through all of this data to find out what truly defined 2011.
New for this year is the discoveries chart. We went back to the beginning of time (well, to 2003) and checked every one of your 61 billion scrobbles to work out which artists were first scrobbled in 2011.
We’ve also broken these charts down by country and tag. Whatever you’re interested in, from experimental music in Mexico, the latest innovations in Finnish pop, or just what’s Big in Japan, you now have a means to browse them.
Following on from last year we are providing you with a data download. Musicbrainz IDs are now included in this data (where we have them) as part of our continued collaboration with Musicbrainz.
Producing the ‘Best of’ Charts is a very different process to our usual weekly charts. What follows is an overview of the process. In particular I’ll explain how we determined the new albums and discoveries of 2011, and how we turned these into the charts you see on the site.
New AlbumsOur top artists are calculated based on albums released in 2011. One issue with albums is that they are typically released many times in many locations. To get around this we used a new version of the Musicbrainz database to find track listings for albums that were first released in 2011.
Of course, that isn’t the end of the story. Our library doesn’t always match up with Musicbrainz. Such issues need to be handled when we align album information from Musicbrainz with our own scrobble data. It’s one of the reasons we’re improving our Musicbrainz ID coverage .
New DiscoveriesWe label an artist as a new discovery if they were first scrobbled in 2011. As I mentioned previously, this can only be decided by checking through all of the scrobbles we have ever received.
This task is complicated by misspelled artist names, collaborations, and remixes. A nice example is Britney Spears’ collaboration with Sabi. Britney is certainly not a new discovery, even though this incorrectly-titled artist was first scrobbled in 2011. We avoid this by mapping artist names to their correct versions, before sorting through their scrobbles.
Our Human ComputerOur final step was to send the charts to our secret weapon: the music team. They pored through thousands of the top artists of 2011, matching them against their own databases and removing/adding artists that were incorrect or missing.
Data DownloadThis year we have two data downloads: the first – like last year’s – contains the top artists and albums of 2011; the second contains only the top artists, because they do not all have associated albums. In the data you’ll find all of the artists and albums from Best of 2011, along with play and listener counts, top tags, and image links.
In both cases we have added Musicbrainz IDs to the data. You can use these on our own API, BBC Music, and The Guardian. Use the data as you please; we look forward to seeing what you come up with!
Categories: Music Rec
Listen With
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Fri, 01/13/2012 - 16:00
Yesterday Facebook got into the “Listen With” game by announcing a new feature that allows people to click a button and listen to what their friends are listening to along with them. I haven’t tried it yet but it does look pretty nice.
Of course, as soon as they announced it, everyone cried “they are stealing from Turntable.fm”. Techcrunch even ran a followup post where Billy Chasen the founder of Turntable.fm said he was flattered Facebook was copying them.
Here’s the thing: Facebook is not copying Turntable. Not only are the features pretty different, but the idea of listening with friends is as old as, I don’t know, say, music.
As listening moved online, one of the promises of that was the idea that we could now network our stereos and listen to music with other people regardless of physical location. I’ll argue that no one has nailed it yet but clearly we are getting close. I believe the way to do it right is to study how, why and when people listen to music and then shape these tools to support that behavior. We (exfm) have some interesting ideas around how to do this, but are not ready to roll anything substantial out yet. Judging from the comments on those TC posts, it looks like there are a bunch of sites out there trying as well.
So to sum up, no Facebook is not copying Turntable.fm. Listening with friends online is a pretty old idea (see my 2004 grad school project Awaire). A bunch of sites are also doing this (see Tomahawk). And in my opinion nobody has gotten it right yet. Oh and if you really want to Listen With in exfm, ok fine, you can do that right here.
Categories: Music Rec
2011's New Discoveries
Last.fm - Fri, 01/13/2012 - 11:36
Every year when Best of rolls around, we look at the chart to see if our data could have predicted who’d make it big. While there are a few in there we saw coming * cough * Adele * cough * the reality is that every year things get harder and harder to foresee.
That’s one of the reasons we launched our New Discoveries chart; to show off just how diverse your year in music really is.
Sure, it’s full of credible indie acts; Purity Ring, Death Grips and Work Drugs all did fairly well, while Wugazi – an album of mash-ups between Wu Tang Clan and Fugazi – made it to 13th place after getting huge buzz over the summer.
Someone we might have expected big things from was former Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher. He made it to number three on the New Discoveries chart, but only to 69 on the overall UK chart. That’s not quite as high as we might have expected. Similarly, Gaslight Anthem side project The Horrible Crowes made it to number 12 on the New Discoveries chart, largely off the back of Gaslight Anthem fans trying it out.
Further down the list GLaDOS makes an appearance. The Aperture Science Psychoacoustics Laboratory made it to number 7 on the chart after Valve released several albums worth of material from Portal 2. Soundtracks often jump to the top of the Hype Chart after hardcore fans flock to new releases, and while none of the artists on Drive were eligible for the New Discoveries chart they all got a huge boost when that came out.
Up until the last minute it looked as if the New Discoveries chart would be topped by none other than Rebecca Black. The “Friday” singer was number one on the chart right up until December, but while her video has collected some 17.5 million views on YouTube Last.fm’s music community only played the song 320,000 times between them.
Our first New Discoveries list is actually topped by Youth Lagoon, the project of Boise, ID native Trevor Powers. His dream-like album shot up the Hype Chart in autumn, and appeared to become a fixture throughout the winter for many listeners. He also creeps into the US overall top chart at 100.
For a taster of what these artists have to offer, listen to our New Discoveries playlist on the recently launched Discover app.
In case you missed it yesterday then our design team played with an early cut of our New Discoveries chart to create this neat little poster as a bit of a bonus. Don’t forget that you can also filter the chart to find the New Discoveries that best reflect your tastes using the Country and Tag options.
Here’s to another unpredictable year in music!
Categories: Music Rec
Controlling the artist distribution in playlists
Music Machinery - Paul Lamere - Echonest - Thu, 01/12/2012 - 13:54
The Echo Nest engineering team just pushed out a new feature giving you more control over the artist makeup in playlists. There is a new parameter to the playlist/static API called distribution that can be set to wandering or focused. When the distribution is set to wandering the artists will appear with approximately equal distribution in the playlist. If the distribution is set to focused artists that are more similar to the seed artists will appear more frequently. When combined with the variety parameter, you have excellent control over the number and distribution of artists in a playlist. If you want to create a playlist suitable for music discovery, create a playlist with high variety and a wandering distribution. If you want to create a playlist that more closely mimics the radio experience choose a low variety and a focused distribution.
I’ve put together a little demo that lets you create playlists with different levels of variety and distribution settings. The demo will create a playlist given a seed artist and show you the artist distribution for the playlist. Here’s the output of the demo with distribution set to focused:
You can see from the artist histogram that the playlist draws more from artists that are very similar to the seed artist (Weezer). Compare to these results from a wandering playlist with the same seed and variety:
You can see that there is flatter distribution of artists in the playlist. You can use variety and distribution to tailor playlists to the listener. For instance, you can give the Classic Rock Radio experience to a listener by setting variety to relatively low, setting the distribution to focused and seeding with a classic rock artist like Led Zeppelin. Here’s the artist distribution for the resulting playlist:
That looks like the artist rotation for my local classic rock radio.
Give the demo a try to see how you can use variety and distribution to match playlists to your listener’s taste. Then read the playlist API docs to see how to use the API to start incorporating these attributes into your apps.
The Demo: Playlist Distribution Demo (source)
Categories: Music Rec
Best of 2011 is here!
Last.fm - Thu, 01/12/2012 - 07:50
Best of 2011 is a reflection of the year in music, highlighting the most popular and hottest new artists all based on the tracks you’ve been scrobbling.
This year’s ‘Top Artists’ chart was compiled by looking at scrobbles for albums released between 1st January and 31st December 2011. As in previous years, we aren’t counting live albums, greatest hits collections, EP’s and singles. You might not be all that surprised when you see who’s sat at number one, but dig a little deeper using our lovely new Country and Tag filtering options to find the No. 1 which suits you!
Another new feature for 2011 we’re really excited about is our ‘Top New Discoveries’ chart. This was compiled by looking at the number of listeners for artists who had their first scrobble between 1st December 2010 and 31st December 2011. Discovering new music is core to the Last.fm experience; so we wanted to highlight the artists who caught your attention this year and who you should keep an eye on during 2012. Again, use the filtering options to personalise your view.
Additionally, we took a look at the Year In Music to see what our data had to say about 2011. We hope you’re as fascinated as we were by the impact of music news on your scrobbles.
For developers, we have provided the chart data as TSV and XML files. Download and start hacking, we’d love to hear what you come up with.
Finally, as a little easter egg, we’ve created a commemorative poster of this year’s New Discoveries chart. The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that it’s slightly different to what you see online; we made this before taking all of December’s data into account. You can download the poster here.
Categories: Music Rec
MIKE SNIPER: An Indie Label in 2012.
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Wed, 01/11/2012 - 16:47
MIKE SNIPER: An Indie Label in 2012.:
I read this post yesterday and loved it. Today we’re featuring these guys as our Site of the Day. Go read the post and then go listen to their music. You’ll love both of them.
I posted a recent Facebook comment regarding our policies with signing artists and found myself getting into a discussion of what the role of an independent label is in 2012, something I’ve often been asked about in interviews but have never really been able to elaborate on.
Basically, it…
Categories: Music Rec
Using The Echo Nest to get the top 100 Twitter artists
Music Machinery - Paul Lamere - Echonest - Wed, 01/11/2012 - 13:28
This week Twitter and The Echo Nest announced a partnership where Twitter IDs for verified accounts are incorporated into The Echo Nest’s ID mapping layer (aka Rosetta Stone). This makes it easy for developers to get the Twitter handle for an artist. To demonstrate just how easy it is, I wrote a little web app that displays the top 100 artists that have verified Twitter accounts. Here’s the core bit of code for the app:
function fetchTopTwitterArtists() { var url = 'http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/artist/top_hottt?callback=?'; $.getJSON(url, { 'api_key': 'GETYOUROWNAPIKEY', 'format':'jsonp', 'results': 100, 'bucket': ['hotttnesss', 'id:twitter'], 'limit': true}, function(data) { for (var i = 0; i < data.response.artists.length; i++) { var artist = data.response.artists[i]; var elem = $("<li>"); var link = $("<a>"); var handle = artist.foreign_ids[0].foreign_id.replace('twitter:artist:', ''); link.attr('href', 'http://twitter.com/' + handle); link.text(artist.name); elem.append(link); $("#results").append(elem); } } }); }
The key bits here are creating the artist/top_hottt request to The Echo Nest and adding the id:twitter bucket and setting limit to true. This tells the Echo Nest to include the twitter handle information in the results and limit the results to only those artists that have twitter information. After that it is just pulling the data out of the results and formatting it for the lovely display. The Twitter ID info is returned in an ID block that looks like this:
{"catalog": "twitter","foreign_id": "twitter:artist:LMFAO"}Note that the Twitter ID is returned in a URN form. To get the actual Twitter URL for an artist we just need to replace the ‘twitter:artist:’ bits with ‘http://twitter.com/’.
You can see the app here: Top 100 artists with verified Twitter accounts. As you can see, I tried to make the web app as ugly as possible. The only thing it needs is some Comic Sansification. The code is available for detailed study in this gist.
Categories: Music Rec
2011 in review
Music Machinery - Paul Lamere - Echonest - Mon, 01/09/2012 - 18:18
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
London Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. This blog was viewed about 390,000 times in 2011. If it were competing at London Olympic Stadium, it would take about 5 sold-out events for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
Categories: Music Rec
Kite by Blonds Kiteis a great song. I love it. shared from exfm
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Mon, 01/09/2012 - 16:31
Kite by Blonds
Kiteis a great song.
I love it.
shared from exfm
Categories: Music Rec
Zeitgeist 2011 People’s Choice
Hypem - Mon, 01/09/2012 - 08:06
Every Hype Machine Zeitgeist tabulates the best music of the year, as decided by music bloggers. This time, we thought it would be interesting to open the voting up to everybody and find out what albums everyone loved in 2011.
We built an album picker stocked with all albums released in 2011 according to Discogs, which over 3500 people used to create and share their top album plaques. The final rank was calculated by assigning points to every album (#1=15 points, 2=14, 3=13, etc), and tallying up the total score. Together with our annual blogger Top 50, the People’s Choice paints a fuller picture of the rich musical landscape of 2011. Explore both lists; you may discover a great album you’ve missed out on the first time around.
1. Bon Iver – Bon Iver (8057) 26. Little Dragon – Ritual Union (1301) 2. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (6749) 27. Destroyer – Kaputt (1250) 3. Adele – 21 (4677) 28. Bombay Bicycle Club – A Different Kind Of Fix (1213) 4. Metronomy – The English Riviera (4244) 29. Skrillex – More Monsters And Sprites (1211) 5. Foster The People – Torches (3964) 30. Friendly Fires – Pala (1195) 6. James Blake – James Blake (3821) 31. The Antlers – Burst Apart (1190) 7. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (3138) 32. The Weeknd – House Of Balloons (1170) 8. Radiohead – The King Of Limbs (2814) 33. Digitalism – I Love You Dude (1134) 9. Justice – Audio, Video, Disco. (2710) 34. Youth Lagoon – The Year Of Hibernation (1119) 10. Washed Out – Within And Without (2651) 35. Drake – Take Care (1080) 11. SBTRKT – SBTRKT (2556) 36. The Rapture – In The Grace Of Your Love (1045) 12. Jay-Z & Kanye West – Watch The Throne (2395) 37. Holy Ghost! – Holy Ghost! (1044) 13. Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes (2393) 38. M83 – Midnight City Remix EP (1026) 14. Cults – Cults (2223) 39. Austra – Feel It Break (1018) 15. Beirut – The Rip Tide (2134) 40. Phantogram – Nightlife (1017) 16. The Black Keys – El Camino (2030) 41. Real Estate – Days (981) 17. The Strokes – Angles (2017) 42. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy (979) 18. Cut Copy – Zonoscope (1821) 43. The Naked And Famous – Passive Me, Aggressive You (959) 19. Florence + The Machine – Ceremonials (1614) 44. The Vaccines – What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? (959) 20. Feist – Metals (1608) 45. Childish Gambino – Camp (898) 21. The Weeknd – Thursday (1559) 46. Neon Indian – Era Extraña (890) 22. Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost (1534) 47. Arctic Monkeys – Suck It And See (881) 23. Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto (1454) 48. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (865) 24. tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l (1355) 49. Toro Y Moi – Underneath The Pine (855) 25. Daft Punk – TRON: Legacy Reconfigured (1333) 50. Death Cab For Cutie – Codes And Keys (850)Categories: Music Rec
3D Spotify Music Explorer
Music Machinery - Paul Lamere - Echonest - Sun, 01/08/2012 - 13:40
Here’s a video of an early prototype of a 3D Music Explorer that runs as a Spotify App. The visualization shows a series of interconnected Echo Nest playlists that you can explore. You can fly through your music, listen to anything you see, and create a new playlist starting at any point in the visualization, all from within the Spotify App.
I’m using the awesome three.js for the 3D bits, all the rest is Echo Nest and Spotify APIs. Frame rates with 500 albums showing is 60 FPS Note that there’s a strange interaction between quicktime (that I used for screen capture) and Spotify audio – I wasn’t able to play new songs in Spotify while recording the demo, so there’s no song changes in the video.
Categories: Music Rec
