Stereogum recently featured a nifty little app for iTunes. iConcertCal (terrible name) scans your iTunes library and creates a calendar of all the bands coming soon to your city. Great idea.
You can download it for Mac or Windows. Stereogum readers seem to like it.
Hum a song into your computer's microphone, and Nayio's Humming Search will might find it. I haven't been able to try it yet as it doesn't work on a Mac, but it still sounds pretty cool. I'm sure it will get better and more accurate over time.
Never really thought about this before, but it could have some serious consequences for some of the biggest selling acts of all time. Copyright law in the UK on sound recordings currently stands at 50 years. 2006 - 50 = 1956. Think about it, in 6-7 years, some of The Beatles biggest hits (i.e. Love Me Do, I Wanna Hold Your Hand) will enter the public domain in the UK. It's about time they cash in by remastering (like Love, which sounds AWESOME) and releasing them on iTunes both in the UK and the US (why not?). Despite industry calls for an extension to 95 years, it looks like that it'll stay 50. In the US, things are a bit different.
Yahoo! Music is reporting that the Beatles' catalog will be available for digital download "soon". Although don't expect to find them on iTunes. Earlier this year Apple Computer won a trademark infringement case over Apple Corps (the Beatles' publishing company).
Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes, said in a May a Bloomberg News interview. “We certainly will do everything we can to get them on iTunes,” he said at that time. “The Beatles aren’t available in any digital format today but they are going to be one day. We certainly hope that happens on iTunes.’”
Rumor has it that Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend is a featured tune on PlayStation 2's Guitar Hero II! How awesome would it be to jam along to one of my all-time favorite songs!! I need to get this game!!! I need to get PlayStation 2 first I guess!!!! I need to stop talking to myself and using excessive exclamation points!!!!!
MP3: Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend (scroll down)
There's likely no need to post this because it is virtually everywhere, but here goes anyway: The Battle of the Album Covers. It's worth it.
This is uncanny: turn Muse into Gwen with a bit of simple knob-fiddling. Who the hell has the time to figure this shit out?! Courtesy of stereogum.
Back in my college days at Drake, I was music director and eventually general manager of KDRK, the campus radio station. We played excellent college alternative music, which in the early-mid 90s was fleeting fast. We worked hard to program it like a real radio station and even made the DJs follow some semblance of a playlist. After all, we were all learning how to work at a real radio station. The kicker is that KDRK really wasn't a radio station. We were only broadcast on local cable TV, hence "The Best Radio on Television," a slogan ahead of its day with Sirius now using "The Best Radio on Radio."
Ten long years after I graduated, today marks the day KDRK becomes a real radio station. Well, it's no longer KDRK and it's still a college radio station, but it's on the air and it's cool to see our dream become a reality for a new generation of geeky AV nerd students. In Des Moines, you can listen to "The Dog," KDRA-LP at 94.1. Online, you can listen here or via iTunes.
We may be past college radio's prime, but I know that decades of work went behind making this a reality at Drake. Congratulations to the profs, students, and alumni involved that helped make this a reality.
Today is the birthday of Ray Bradbury. Bradbury is an American icon with more than 500 published works including short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, and verse. Some classics include The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Although mostly described as Science Fiction Bradbury only claimed to write one Science Fiction book, preferring to describe his works as Fantasy as Science Fiction is a depiction of the real.
Some of my favorite Bradbury works include those for television. He wrote many Alfred Hitchcock Presents and possibly the best Twilight Zone episode the unbelievable I Sing the Body Electric.
