Music

Visual Shazam Exists Now—To Sell You Junk

Shazam is expanding to the visual world. Now you can use your phone’s camera to scan the Shazam logo on printed media. Shazam will then load up some other “content.” Who asked for this? In its purely audio form, Shazam is magic. You’re in a bar, you hear a song, you want to know what…

This Surreal Rotoscoping Of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” Is Everything

How did civilization exist before we had this? A group of 49 animation students were each given 52 frames of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” music video, to rotoscope anyway they wanted. The results are surreal and astonishing. Can’t stop, won’t stop, watching this madness. [via BoingBoing] Contact the author at [email protected].

Skrillex Made Some Expensive, Pointless Phone Cases With Google

Skrillex and Google have “teamed up” to bring a new line of Live Cases that juice your phone with new features. The new Live Cases have gaudy sci-fi designs straight from the mind of the electronic musicstar. The cases have built-in NFC chips that talk to your phone and unlock new features: “live wallpaper” that…

Peter Dinklage Teams Up With Coldplay For Game Of Thrones: The Musical!

For Red Nose Day, Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage is singing a hilarious blues jam about the fact that he’s “Still Going Strong” after Ned Stark, Robert Baratheon and so many other great characters have died. Basically, he’s paid the cost to be the boss. [h/t Frank!] Contact the author at [email protected].

Laibach Explains Why Science And Fiction Are Such A Powerful Combination

The Slovenian avant-garde rock band Laibach references science fiction a lot in their music, from Margaret Atwood to Kurt Vonnegut — and they did music for the science fiction spoof Iron Sky. In a new interview, they explain why science fiction is such an important dialectic for them. Talking to Westword, Laibach explains: Science fiction…

Watch and listen to the fascinating process of making a steel pan drum

Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of banging and hammering and mashing and even torching involved in making a steel pan drum but watching it all come together and to see flat steel get shaped in the most irregular pounding way to create the most perfect sounding notes for each section is pretty damn awesome. I…

The short answer to the question “Could a robot write the perfect pop song?” is “No,” because, as this piece in The Atlantic suggests, the pop star of tomorrow will probably be an avatar instead of a robot, offering up popular Japanese “android diva” Hatsune Miku as an example.

Rdio Launches $4 Service For Budget Streaming

Jay-Z’s TIDAL made big, messy waves the other month when it launched a $20-a-month streaming service. The accepted monthly rate for this kind of streaming service has normalized around $10 — which is why Rdio’s is hoping to undercut the competition with a new $4 tier. http://gawker.com/tidal-atry-my-tortuous-trial-with-jay-zs-overpriced-sp-1697023467 For that paltry amount of money, Rdio Select…

Watch a musician play every instrument in a 70-person orchestra at once

This is great. Ben Morfitt cleverly and hilariously recorded a video of himself playing every instrument of a 70-person orchestra at the same time. It looks like he’s conducting an entire orchestra of musicians but it’s really an expertly edited cut of 70 versions of himself playing all at once. It was all filmed in…

Britney Spears And Iggy Azalea’s Remake Of Earth Girls Are Easy Is Awful

Here it is — the video for “Pretty Girls” by Britney Spears and Iggy Azalea, which is supposedly inspired by the classic movie Earth Girls Are Easy. The best part is where the women say things like “Your alien powers are like totally radical” to Iggy, who’s a visiting alien who just wants to party.…

Listen To The Most Astonishing Musical Style Ever: Throat Singing

There is no question that the human voice is a remarkable musical instrument, but few singing styles hit that point home as well as overtone singing — commonly known as throat singing —does. And it’s incredible to hear and watch multiple pitches coming out of a single mouth. Throat singing from Mongolia, where the style…

A Chart Of The Most Commonly Used Keys Shows Our Actual Musical Tastes

Switching a song into a different key can entirely change the way that song feels. So what does this chart, which shows which musical keys are most commonly used, tell us about the way we actually like to listen to music? Spotify’s Kenny Ning put together this chart of the most commonly used song keys…

Apple and Google Are Racing to Analyze Your DNA

Technology is filled with all kinds of rumors, real and fabricated. It gives us a look at might be and will be. BitStream gathers the whispers all in one place to divine what the future has in store. Smartphones allow us to do just about anything, and soon, analyzing our DNA could be up there…

How to Transfer Playlists Between Streaming Music Apps

Ditching Spotify for Rdio? Giving Tidal a try alongside Deezer? If you’ve got carefully curated playlists in one streaming service then you might be reluctant to start again from scratch with a new one, but Soundiiz lets you transfer your song lists between apps with the minimum of fuss. Head to the Soundiiz Beta website…

Grooveshark Defiantly Resurrected By a Rogue Pirate

Last week, after a protracted court battle with music rights holders, the illegal online streaming service Grooveshark went dark. But an ambitious, and mysterious person named “New Grooveshark” emailed me today with news that they’d defiantly brought back the site at a new address at grooveshark.io. The shark just won’t die. For those that don’t…

After Nearly Ten Years, the Record Industry Finally Killed Grooveshark

Remember Grooveshark, that bootleggy version of Pandora that let you stream any song, in surprisingly high quality, for free? After nearly a decade of blatant copyright infringement, the site’s finally totally kaput. Top image: Gadgetdude / Flickr Here’s an excerpt of the epitaph that now lives on Grooveshark’s website, which hints at the very serious…

How to Recover Deleted Playlists in Spotify

Got rid of a carefully crafted Spotify playlist that you later wish you hadn’t? Fear not, because Spotify keeps a list of the playlists you’ve deleted, and you can bring them back in seconds—here’s how to do it. The feature lives on the web—though not in the actual web player—and can be used to restore…

How to Recover Deleted Playlists in Spotify

Got rid of a carefully crafted Spotify playlist that you later wish you hadn’t? Fear not, because Spotify keeps a list of the playlists you’ve deleted, and you can bring them back in seconds—here’s how to do it. The feature lives on the web—though not in the actual web player—and can be used to restore…

Watch Some Of The Strangest Musical Instruments Ever Built In Action

We’re used to seeing a wide variety of instruments, from the tiny piccolo to the grand piano, but every now and then, someone designs an instrument so magnificent or unusual that it takes a while to wrap our brains around them. So what do they sound like? And how exactly do you play them? The…

Spotify Data Proves You’re Not As Cool As You Used To Be

If you’re over the age of thirty, you’re a musical dinosaur. You probably don’t understand the garbage those “damn kids” are listening to and you don’t want to. You’re not cool. When did this happen? Spotify may have just figured it out. Remember when Spotify was letting you check out your musical year-in-review? It used…