Day and Night Digital | Irish Independent

Top 10 music discovery sites you should know

We all can navigate our way around Youtube, blogs, Spotify and sites like Last.FM by now but what other sites can help you find your new favourite band? Digital looks at ten others you should know…

1. Soundcloud – It started as a highly intuitive way for bands and labels to share music with others. Thanks to its lightning fast speed and visual waveform interface, Soundcloud has become the place to catch the latest new tracks, particularly in dance and electronic circles. Try out http://player.thejackplug.com as it shows you the most popular tracks on Soundcloud.com.

2. Tuneglue – An expandable interactive spider diagram that helps you find related artists to who you search for. It’s extremely accurate and is essentially a cool visualisation of the musical landscape and its interconnectedness.

3. Grooveshark – It seems to be operating in a legal grey area but its popularity is not in question. Type in a few artists and build a streaming playlist made up of user-uploaded songs. The library is deep with plenty of remixes and full albums.

4. 14tracks.com – If underground movements and cutting-edge genres are your bag, 14tracks is perfect for you. Handpicked compilations based on themes like Scandanavian disco, cosmic soul, junglist hardcore, UK funky and loads more for about €7.50 each.

5. The Hype Machine – The daddy of the MP3 blogs. Put simply: “Every day, thousands of people around the world write about music they love, and it all ends up here.”
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Ok, no embedding allowed

Whether you like them or not, Chicago rock band OK Go are probably on your radar. This is almost exclusively down to the success of a viral music video for their song Here it Goes Again in 2006. The video which showed the band doing choreographed moves on four treadmills is one of the internet’s most popular videos of all-time with nearly 50 million views and ended up winning a Grammy award the following year.

Four years later and OK Go are learning that the online landscape of 2010 is a different beast. The band released a new album Of The Blue Color Of The Sky at the start of the year. To promote it, they got the Notre Dame marching band involved and shot a music video, but when the video was released the band were deluged with complaints. Why? The band’s record label EMI had blocked the embedding of the video as well as blocking broadcast in other countries, disabling fans’ ability to share and embed the video on their own blog or profile.

Since the success of OK Go’s viral video, the four major labels have gone after Youtube as a source of revenue. The agreement works by Youtube only paying the label for views that are streamed from Youtube.com. The result? EMI have disabled all their artist videos as have Sony BMG. So if you want to embed an official Ke$ha video you’re out of luck there too. (more…)

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Music blogs bear the brunt of industry miscommunication

Google found itself at the centre of a lot of criticism when it shut down seven popular music blogs without warning last week. The blogs in question Pop Tarts Suck Toasted, I Rock Cleveland, Masala, To Die By Your Side, It’s a Rap, Ryan’s Smashing Life, and Living Ears had in some cases, up to five years of music writing dumped from Google’s Blogger servers without notification for alleged US copyright infringement.

Maddeningly, many of the offending MP3s in question on these blogs were actually approved by bands and record labels. Miscommunication between some tiers in the music industry led to legal reps for these labels issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices to Google despite the fact that marketing and PR wings of the same company had sent the bloggers the tracks in the first place. In one bizarre case, a DMCA notice requested that the band BLK JKS remove their own song from their official site.

To complicate things further, the correspondence the bloggers received from Google didn’t specify what songs were the cause of the infringement making it very difficult, as suggested by Google to file a counter-claim. If you don’t know what you did wrong exactly, how can you correct it? (more…)

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Die Antwoord: South Africa’s rap-rave comedy crossover

Move over Flight of the Conchords, there’s a new comedy musical troupe in town. Where Brett and Jemaine used their New Zealand accents as a basis for misheard interpretation gags, South African trio Die Antwoord go the whole indecipherable hog and make impenetrable African hip-hop filled with colloquial slang that manages to be funny and confusing at the same time. If Ali G was from Cape Town, he’d be in their gang.

Die Antwoord are made up of “zef rap-rave monster” Ninja (zef meaning common or white trash), shrill-voiced “fresh futuristik rich bitch” Yo-landa Vi$$er and DJ Hi-Tek. They first came to attention a few weeks ago when their odd music videos popped up on various pop culture websites. When we say odd we mean like Enter The Ninja which mixes the boom-bap of hip-hop with euphoric Euro synths with a screeching chorus from Yo-Landa or the ’90s rave-rap of ‘Beat Boy’.

Despite their comedy stylings and dubious origins, just like Ali G they actually managed to fool plenty of people into thinking they were the real-deal white-trash rap pack of Cape Town. Their impressive website will no doubt be where the trio attempt to capitalise on their viral meme status when they release a free downloadable album soon.

Read about I’m From Barcelona & Dion Dublin’s music instrument >>

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Duke Special’s fan funding adventure & faking the band

A couple of weeks ago, Digital covered the crowdfunding aspect of music when UK band Scars on Broadway were mentioned for the way they raised money from fans through slicethepie.com. So it’s good to see that our own Duke Special is the latest example of an artist who has received funding direct from fans.

Using Pledgemusic.com, the eyeliner-wearing dreadlocked one is hoping to release three albums and put on some “unusual and elaborate theatrical experiences” with the money raised. 15% of the total will also go towards the charity DePaul.

The three albums include a studio version of songs written for a recent production of Mother Courage & Her Children, an EP of songs based on Huckleberry Finn and a collection of songs inspired by Paul Auster’s book The Book of Illusions recorded by Steve Albini featuring Neil Hannon, Ed Harcourt and others.

To encourage pledges, Duke offered exclusive items including signed albums, a private concert, a sightseeing tour, dinner, a write a song session and a phone call all with Duke himself. It appears to have worked as those items are gone and in total he has received 573 pledges or 118% of the funds he originally asked for.

Last week, I featured (with a question mark) what was claimed to be a new Daft Punk song from the movie soundtrack to Tron Legacy. As reported by Pitchfork, it turns out the track is a fake but it’s not the only French dance music-related skullduggery happening on the net.
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Whose viral is it anyway?

Last month, two mysterious high-budget video clips (see below) were sent to music sites like PopJustice and Gorilla Vs Bear and a viral campaign was born. From a Youtube user intriguingly called ‘iamamiwhoami’ the two clips of one minute length featured some synth-heavy electronica, images of arms jutting out of trees in a forest, an obscured blonde woman in a foetal position who then licks the sap of a tree, an owl and some frankly gross translucent egg laying.

No real clue was left about who the artist behind it is. As it was sent to music websites, we’re assuming it was music-related and various artist guesses have been thrown around. Comments reasoned it was The Knife or Fever Ray as the song certainly sounds like their brand of Scandanavian electronica and matches their weird visual aesthetic. Others plucked for Goldfrapp mainly because the clip features an owl which they’ve used in their artwork before and a new album is imminent. Those who have heard the first single Rocket and its ’80s glam sound will disagree however. A fake twitter account for iamamiwhoami hasn’t helped either.
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Crowdsourcing musicians of the future

Since the Pixies reunion tour wound down last year, guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer Dave Lovering have been busy working on their new band project. Entitled The Everybody they quietly released a nine-track album called Avatar (timely) before Christmas.

As well as regular download versions, they are also offering a deluxe package with a twist. For $40 (€27.83) you get the album in lossless FLAC format, bonus songs and videos but most importantly, royalty-free stems of each song with the legal right to create new music or remixes from the band’s work.You can sell them commercially if you like or you can submit your music back to Joey and Dave via Soundcloud for the opportunity to be included in the second side of a vinyl package called The Everybody Else later in the year. Now, the name makes sense. More info at theeverybody.com.

These Pixies guys aren’t the only ones experimenting with online submissions as it was announced that annoying gossip blogger Perez Hilton is to team up with pop choreographer Jamie King, American Idol creator and entertainment management mogul Simon Fuller in a bid to bring us “The Boy Band for the next generation”. Groan. (more…)

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New bands to watch in 2010

Running in parallel to the annual music critics’ new bands features, music bloggers are posting their “ones to watch” lists for the year ahead. History shows they are worth paying attention to. Last week’s BBC Sound of 2010 poll featured Marina and the Diamonds, The Drums and Ellie Goulding at the top, all acts which have been bigged up on blogs for eons. So what acts are bloggers excited about for 2010?

Starting with Neon Gold is a good idea seeing as they actually released Marina and Ellie’s first singles last year. They’ve listed 15 artists they are looking forward to hearing more of including New York’s sincere emo-tinged folksters Freelance Whales and LA-born pop queen in the making 17-year old Sky Ferreira who is working on an album with top-class names like DJs Aeroplane, producer Paul Epworth (Bloc Party, Friendly Fires) and the heavyweight Swedish pop team of Bloodshy & Avant. The latter are part-responsible for Britney Spears’ Toxic.

Highlights from The Music Fix’s list of 18 acts include Sunderland’s stylistic Dexys Midnight Runners-inspired indie-popsters Frankie and the Heartstrings, the ’80s-synth heavy Parallels, the French-revolution-namechecking Manchester band May 68 and Hyperdub dubstep producer Darkstar.

Spin Earth takes a global view of things looking at bands from around the world whose profiles are rising. Taking one from each continent featured, we have Nigeria’s soulful Nneka who recalls Erykah Badu, Hong Kong’s cute and twee duo My Little Airport, Europe is represented by the under-loved Scotch folk of Frightened Rabbit, Chile’s garage rockers Los Howlers do it for South America, the US east coast’s Bethany Cosentino aka Best Coast impresses with her melodious scuzz-pop for North America while Sydney’s answer to Fleet Foxes with synths Cloud Control bring it home to Australia.

Closer to home, the bloggers behind Swear I’m Not Paul and 2UIBestow have teamed up to offer their top ten Irish acts which include Belfast rockers A Plastic Rose, the impressive indie-folk of Henrietta Game and Dublin duo We Cut Corners.

We Cut Corners also feature in State.ie’s Faces of 2010 week which shines a light on homegrown alternative acts like Cork’s O Emperor, the cinematic uneasiness of Catscars, the return of Carol Keogh, Dundalk’s promising Take The Money and Run complete with magnetising female vocalist and the soon to be Stephen Street-produced Funeral Suits.

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The 20 Best iPhone apps

With over 100,000 applications now available in the Apple store and with the rising ubiquity of the the iPhone in Ireland, many of you might be wondering what apps to use. Here are 20 of Day and Night’s must have killer apps.

1. Dictionary.com – a complete English dictionary and thesaurus downloaded to your phone (free).
2. Wikipanion – searches Wikipedia in a faster time than the official app (free).
3. iCensus – Search the National Archive of Ireland’s 1911 Census from your phone (€2.99).

Movie Genie – For those times when you need to know where you recognise an actor from, you need this IMDB client (€1.59).

4. eBuddy – Instant message facility which can connect to MSN, Yahoo, Gmail and Facebook. Available for free and in a pro version with extra features (€2.39).
5. Ireland Rail/ Dublin Buster – Essential travelling apps with realtime route and arrival information (€1.59/ free).

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The Best LOLs of the Web 2009

It’s that time again. It’s time to celebrate our strength, our creativity, our uniqueness, our heroes, our humanity and.. our ability to upload videos of unfortunate mishaps to Youtube.

What bigger heroine has 2009 offered us than Susan Boyle? She started the year a dowdy spinster. An appearance on Britain’s Got Talent and over 100 million Youtube views later and she ends the year as one of the biggest selling album artists of 2009 worldwide. Let us not forget the performance that started it all.

Other people became known for very different reasons this year. Tom O’ C (aka T O’ Pain) became an accidental rap sensation overnight, Christian Bale was caught on tape freaking out at a film crew member and Kanye had a bad year all round. Firstly, with the South Park Gay Fish parody and secondly with his interruption of Taylor Swift’s MTV award speech, an event which became an internet meme albeit an ephemeral one.

The year’s longest lasting internet meme was Play him off Keyboard Cat which spawned hundreds of video remixes and mashups like this Hall and Oates version while close behind was anything involving autotune including autotuned news reports and ads.

For once-off viral videos, nothing beats David, a young boy whose dazed state after a visit to the dentist was captured by his dad and uploaded to the web. For those looking to get their dance craze on, you should watch the wedding video entrance to end them all and those who can’t get enough of cute kids should check out the floppy-haired five year old playing Folsom Prison Blues or the less innocent but equally impressive redhead kid dancing to dirty rap songs.
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