I just got my invite to the latest entrant in the Music Discovery/Community web world, called Jango.com. At first glance it seems to be a cross between Pandora and Last.fm but with a lot more Ajax and a really nice user interface. The jury is still out on the music selection though. They don’t have a lot of the artists that I like, instead they tend to have more main stream popular stuff. Hopefully that will improve over time. They are in invite only Beta now, so you’ll have to work a little to get your invite. You can go to the jango.com homepage to signup for an invite or give inviteshare a try.

You can read more about jango at readwriteweb

Yep, you heard me right. Watch Slayer’s live show at San Diego Sports Arena on August 25, 2007 via YeboTV. Woot! Slayer is awesome and if you’ve never seen them live, now’s your chance.

Listen to Slayer

One of my favorite bands has launched a new look website in support of their new album and tour. The Beastie Boys are back with a new album, The Mix Up, and a new web site. The website has all the usuals, tour dates, store and audio visuals in addition to lots of pictures and video from the tour and blog updates. This is how the Beasties describe there new site

All types of foolishness. Bloggishness, and even the odd new tour date. International, y’all! Hope you enjoy.

If you want to get a sample of what their new album sounds like then take a trip Labor Day weekend to George, WA’s for the Sasquatch festival . The Beasties will be playing along with a great line-up, including the original line-up of Bad Brains (w/ HR) also playing new material. It’s a shame I can’t make it. Darn. The Beasties new album is all instrumental, meaning they play their own instruments in the spirit of Pollywog Stew and Ill Communications.

Last.fm has been one of my favorite web tools of late. When I first discovered Last.fm, in late 2005, I didn’t quite get it. I still think they have lots of room for improvement, but overall I like the community and music tools much better than anything else out there. However, Virb.com has potential in this category, if they improve music options.

Oh, the reason that I wrote this post was to share the latest rumor. according to Steve O’Hear, Last.fm is in purchase negotiations with Viacom and the “The purchase price is said to be $450 million”.

There is a new music discovery site, appropriately named, musicovery. It looks to be in French but you can easily figure out the functions. First off all, it’s all in flash and looks really nice. Unlike other music players, musicovery shows you a visual reference of what song and band is coming up next and what song will come up later. The sound quality is not so great, I assume because the bit rate is pretty low. However, it’s still pretty fun to play around with. One really cool thing is that they have a slider type bar displaying years from the 50’s – 2000’s. You can pick a specific year or a spread of years and musicovery will play music from that time period. I would love to see a feature like that on Pandora. Overall, like I pointed out before, musicovery is fun to play around with, but it probably want be a daily user.

technorati tags: musicovery.com, music, last.fm

I just noticed the banner below, on the Pandora site. I listen to Pandora pretty much everyday, and like it a lot. Now, they’ve partnered with Slim Devices, makers of Squeezebox. I’m not exactly sure what they mean by “partner”. I would assume it’s just cross promotions, because it looks like you could access Pandora with Squeezebox anyway, without the partnership. I guess I’m just going to have to get one to find out for sure.

technorati tags: pandora, slimdevices, squeezebox

Yesterday Songbird released their Preview version to the public. Songbird is a pretty damn cool music player that is built on top of the Mozilla Framework. So, it not only is a music player, like Itunes, but it also has a cool discovery tool. You can use it to browse to a website and it will display any available music files (formats including MPEG Audio (mpga), MPEG Layer 3 (mp3), MP4 Audio (mp4a), Ogg Vorbis, Speex, AAC, WMA, FLAC, and less important: LPCM, ADPCM, AMR).

I downloaded Songbird last night and like it very much. It passed the test of putting all of my 300gb of music into its library. I plan on using Songbird for the next couple of weeks and then come back and give a more detailed post at that time. In the mean time, check out what others are saying about Songbird.

Kevin Burtons FeedBlog- “Songbird Rocks”
TechCrunch- “Songbird To Launch Tonight”

technorati tags: songbird, music, itunes, mp3, mozilla

Back in September I did a profile on Pandora (Discover new music you’ll love ); a music discovery player. I decided to do another post about it because if you listen to music then you MUST check out Pandora. My usual day consists of me staring at my computer for hours at a time. While I’m there, I listen to music pretty much all day. I currently have over 250gb of music on my music server, but find myself listening to Pandora more than the music i currently “own”. The reason is simple, Pandora does a fantastic job of discovering new music for me based on other artists or songs that I like. It blows me away how great the recommendation are. It must have taken the people at Pandora and the Music Genome Project a long time to categorize the music. As a matter of fact it took five years:

Over the past 5 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

To read more about Pandora, make sure you check out “Algorhythm and Blues” By: Linda Tischler over at Fast Company. Like I stated earlier, if you listen to music you MUST check out Pandora.

technorati tags: pandora, music, music+discovery, new+music

They other day I did a post about blummy (Organize your bookmarks, with Blummy). After doing some digging around on Blummy, I found out that the founder/programmer Alexander Kirk, also did another site called bandnews.org. Basically, bandnews.org is a search engine for bands. What they do is spider band websites worldwide and automatically arranges them to present the most recent news first. In the words of bandnews, this is what they say about their features:

“Search and browse in over 800 news sources, read about the latest band information and discover new bands in the genre sections. Login to myBandnews to personalise your own newsfeed by selecting your favorite bands. You can also suggest new bands, we haven’t included in the system yet.”

It’s a pretty cool app. Go ahead and try it for your self by clicking here
.

technorati tags: bandnews.org, bandnews, blummy, bookmarklets, del.icio.us

After doing a write up about Pandora (see Discover new music you’ll love 09-02-2005) a couple of weeks ago. I took a look around to see if there were other music players that were similar. I came across Last.fm, which happens to be an older application but was just redesigned in 2005. Unlike Pandora, Last.fm is a downloadable application. At first glance, it looks like in order to get the full experience from Last.fm you will need to download 2 applications. The first application is an ad-on for Itunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp and others. This ad-on collects this music that you play and sends it back to Last.fm. With the hopes that it will build a better playlist based on your actual likes. The second application is the actual last.fm music player. Last.fm generates recommendations from your musical tastes by compiling a list of people who listen to the same things you do and suggests bands they also play and that you don’t.

Here’s how Last.fm describes their service:

“You get your own online music profile that you can fill up with the music you like. This information is used to create a personal radio station and to find users who are similar to you. Last.fm can even play you new artists and songs you might like. It’s addictive, it’s growing, it’s free, it’s music.”

Check out for yourself by click here.

Technorati Tags: socialnetworks, chris mullins, allthatscool, pandora, lastfm, music