Friday, April 25, 2008

New Features

Well, I was playing around with last.fm and The Hype Machine (hypem.com) a bit in the last couple days (thanks to Daniel!) and found some cool things and have some ideas about things that I might add to the blog. If you scroll down the panel on the right side of the blog, you'll get to some last.fm and Hype Machine widgets that I've added near the bottom.

The last.fm widgets show the latest music I've been listening to and album covers from stuff I've listened to. I thought they were pretty cool, I'll probably experiment with some different versions of those over the next while. I read an article not too far back that since amazon.com added some full length track previews at last.fm they increased mp3 sales by a large percentage (can't remember the exact number) - and that's within the current environment for music sales! One small glimmer of hope for the music biz. Here's an example:




I'm going to see if I can add a last.fm 'playlist' widget to my playlist posts including the tracks they have - not sure how significant an undertaking that might be - my enthusiasm level for doing that will probably be directly related to how much effort it is. Last.fm includes at least a 30 second sample of the song which will help if you're not sure about what a track that's listed might sound like. In some cases they have full samples and in others (such as for a couple Slave to the SQUAREwave tracks) there are free mp3 downloads available from last.fm.

The Hype Machine

The Hype Machine seems to be more focussed on new releases and what's being included on many music blogs out there. Many of the recent tunes that David adds into the mix can be found there. I've added a widget that includes links to some of the recently released tracks from David's playlists. I found some good stuff - and I'm reasonably sure they're all full length tracks, but I haven't spent too much time exploring and sampling that site yet.

Finally, with kudos to SMoKaLoTaPoT, I should now be able to record the Rock's web feed. I might be able to start including samples of tracks I wasn't able to ID so that anyone who's interested can have a listen to see if they're able to help ID them. This one is also going to be dependant on how time intensitive that process is (and how interested I am in ID'ing the track!)

Thanks to all who have left feedback, please continue to do so, I'd love to hear potential ideas for the blog, etc.

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