I am delighted with the new Santana recording, Shape Shifter. I have listened to it several times today on Spotify, first the Carlos Santana track by track commentary edition then the full recording.
It’s such a treat to finally have Shape Shifter available after all these years of anticipation.
I will be publishing a more comprehensive album review along with other thoughts and interpretations later this week.
Here is the back cover of the Shape Shifter CD which lists the tracks and provides Carlos’s heartfelt message that we should all honor and respect the indigenous people of all nations.
As people from around the world converge on Austin to attend the famous music conference this week, we are pleased to offer folks a refuge – introducing The Spotify House Presented by MSN. Spotify will be setting up home for a week-long series of artist sessions including an extra special live show housed at a secret location on Thursday 15th March.
We’re delighted to join Spotify in Austin at the Spotify House presented by MSN. MSN’s global community is passionate about music and we’re excited to align with Spotify to keep you in the know on music.
Daniel Ek’s knowing smile graces the cover of Forbes Magazine, January 16th issue. At 28 years of age he is the most important man in music now. He is CEO and co-founder of Spotify, the Web music ecosystem. Spotify is radically altering how we interact with music in the cloud. It’s a disruption whose time is a necessity. Spotify is the salvation for the music industry against Internet music piracy.
I couldn’t be happier with Spotify’s achievements on our behalf. I have sung the praises of Spotify ever since their Web music service hit our shores. I am proud to say I became a day one US Spotify premium member on July 14, 2011
Spotify continues to amaze me as it becomes the intersection of music and technology in the Web. It is a prime example of a well executed Web 3.0 Semantic application. I am especially keen on how Spotify the music platform interacts with the aggregate sum total of music intelligence that is the echo nest. Spotify Radio is the vehicle that leverages the direct API interaction with the echo nest API of 30 million songs (5 billion data points.) Now that’s what I call a music cloud
SpotOn Radio is an innovative Apple iPhone music app. SpotOn Radio is developed and supported by the dynamic duo known as Springworks and Rebel&Bird.
SpotON Radio is free, but you need a Spotify Premium membership to use it. I just so happens I have a Spotify Premium account.
SpotOn Radio provides personalized radio stations which springboard off Spotify’s streaming technology. It seamlessly integrates an online music service(Spotify) with the Echo Nest’s song recommendation and discovery engine.
What’s awesome about SpotOn Radio is that it adds value and dimension to my Spotify social music experience. I recently cancelled my Pandora One account. I had a twinge of regret breaking away from the music genome experience Pandora has patented.
My anxiety turned out to be a momentary concern. The Echo Nest Music API engine with 30 million songs in its database (and growing) gives SpotOn Radio a superior advantage over Pandora Internet Radio.
The song by Chicago comes to mind here, “Only the beginning, only just the start….”
Keep your eyes and ears on SpotOn Radio and Echo Nest. The Semantic Web, Web 3.0 is in full-scale music interaction now. I think that’s so cool
Can you feel the energy coming from Bruce Springsteen with a renewed vengeance this morning?
The first song from Bruce Springsteen’s new album, Wrecking Ball was released this a.m. on amazon.com*, “We Take Care of Our Own.” I picked it up from the Amazon Cloud. (Its also available for direct play on Spotify too
Here is the video of “We Take Care of Our Own” with lyrics.
Said longtime manager Jon Landau in a press release posted at brucespringsteen.net, “Bruce has dug down as deep as he can to come up with this vision of modern life. The lyrics tell a story you can’t hear anywhere else and the music is his most innovative in recent years. The writing is some of the best of his career and both veteran fans and those who are new to Bruce will find much to love on ‘Wrecking Ball.’ “
There will be a special edition of Wrecking Ball available on March 6th. It has two bonus tracks and exclusive artwork and photography.
Track listing:
We Take Care of Our Own
Easy Money
Shackled and Drawn
Jack of All Trades
Death to My Hometown
This Depression
Wrecking Ball
You’ve Got It
Rocky Ground
Land of Hope and Dreams
We Are Alive
Swallowed Up
American Land
Expect information about the Bruce Springsteen North America tour dates to take place soon. We’re eager to see Bruce and the E. Street Band again.
Rosemary and I attended the last show at Giants Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey by Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street band in 2009 . The ones before the Wrecking Ball. As a matter of fact we saw two shows that week, show #2 and show #5 that week.
Here is Wrecking Ball from the first night we attended (Friday October 2, 200), brings me to tears to see him give Clarence a kiss and start the show, so miss Clarence….
Spotify continues to lead and innovate the music-streaming experience. I am very impressed by Spotify’s Phase II strategy.
Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO states, “We’ve arrived at a crucial moment when we have both scale and momentum, and we’re getting people used to the idea again that music is worth paying for.”
The next phase of Spotify is Spotify Apps. App Finder is a dashboard that lets us lean back and sift through results of music trends in the form of rich playlists. Prominent music publications, services and blogs like Rolling Stone Magazine, Billboard, Last.fm, and Pitchfork supply interpretive analytic data to us in digestible, usable form.
I especially like how nimble the HTML 5 Apps are for my use. They are definitely designed with future interactions in mind. Spotify understands the intelligence and sophistication of its hard-core subscribers. Spotify is acting as the conduit to further the relationship between rich music information sources and the ever attentive listening public.
I was leafing through the September 29th issue of Rolling Stone Magazine yesterday when I happened upon the article, “Meet SuperHeavy, Mick Jagger’s Wild New Crew” by Neil Strauss. I was invigorated by what I discovered about Dave Stewart’s vision realized.
I gave the CD SuperHeavy an extended listen on Spotify this morning. I love what I heard and felt. The melting pot of rhythms, ideas, cultures, and raw energy works cohesively. The 18 months these artists have spent working on this recording is a testament to their belief in each other and the music they are turning out.
Give SuperHeavy a view and listen to the entire recording on Spotify. You’ll be grooving in your chair and elsewhere.
I continue with this week’s impromptu theme, female singer/songwriter’s of note. Today’s music blog post features Sarah McLachlan.
I know very little about Sarah McLachlan’s catalog of songs. This post is the perfect opportunity to explore the breadth and depth of her music.
I learned Sarah McLachlan’s discography represents 22 years of official recordings. I am overwhelmed where to begin when confronted with such an extensive body of work.
The Internet provides a rich avenue of information about Sarah McLachlan’s music. Wikipedia is a great starting point as is Sarah’s official Web site. I also turn to Spotify, iTunes and amazon to get a better sense of what Sarah McLachlan recordings people are buying. There are two aspects measured that help me tune in to her music, 1) Bestselling, and 2) Top Rated, which don’t always correlate, providing a dichotomy for a budding listener like myself.
Based upon this data I begin my quest with Sarah McLachlan’s discography with Surfacing (1997).
