Turntable.FM

I have recently been spending some time on http://turntable.fm/lobby.

You need to check this site out if:

1) All of your Pandora swing dance stations aren't inspiring you enough

2) You want to listen to DJ's and dancers from across the country play their favorite tunes

3) You are an aspiring DJ that wants to try out music with a crowd rating your selections

4) You are an aspiring DJ that wants a quick way to grow their music collection

5) You are a seasoned DJ (that may be competitive) and you want to strut your stuff

6) You like rating a DJ's selection of a song (as you can "awesome" or "lame" every song)

7) You read this blog and like listening to songs your grandfather thought were hip

8) You will "awesome" the majority of the songs I spin on there -- I get more points that way!

WARNING: It can enjoyably ruin your sleep pattern as you may find yourself with other fellow music nerds that enjoy "geeking" out about different versions of songs, themes, and all out dancing fun into the wee hours of the night.

Rooms to check out:

"Swing Music For Dancers" and "Blues Music For Dancers"

The "Swing Music for Dancers" room has been growing pretty rapidly in the amount of listeners and the "Blues Music for Dancers" room is still fairly new, but I'd expect it to continue to grow.

You are able to upload any files from your computer to play as long as they are in mp3 format as well as search using the already uploaded library.

I've noticed that DJ'ing on this site with a full crowd of like minded (and some not so like minded) DJ's that it pushes me deeper into my collection to find hidden gems I'd forgotten about or didn't even realize I had.

Spread the word! Check it out! I look forward to seeing you on the turntables soon!

First Friday playlist on Spotify

I've been playing with Spotify for a couple of weeks now, but pretty casually, and I'm sure that I'm not taking advantage of most of the features. I think I've succeeded in publishing my playlist from last Friday's dance at Big City Swing. If you have Spotify, check it out:

2011-10-07 First Friday at BCS

From what I can tell, only about 2/3 of the songs that I played will be available for you to hear, but still that's better than nothing.

Please leave a comment if it works for you--or if it doesn't, tell me what happened. Depending on how well it works, I may start publishing more playlists.

Finding & organizing music

Danny writes:

I have started to DJ a bit outside of my college club and I was wondering if you had any tips. The main things I am wondering are (1) once you have a music base, how do you organize it and (2) what is your main source for acquiring new music/discovering new music. I read what you said about acquiring music, but I'm just wondering if you pick from all of those sites equally (do you use jazz-online.com?) or do you have one you use most?

My response:

My go-to source for finding tracks is definitely EMusic (followed by Amazon if it is not available on EMusic). I use jazz-online every now and again, especially if I am interested in exploring odd-ball tracks by a particular artist. For instance, I grabbed pretty much every Hot Lips Page off that site. He's got a fantastic rendition of St. James Infirmary that you should check out. I also buy a lot of music from current bands, either through BandCamp or directly from the artist webpages. When I'm at a weekend event with one or more good bands, I almost always buy some (or ALL) of their music.

As far as sources for finding out about new artists and music, I read blogs by other DJs and musicians (like Christian Bossert's, Sam Carroll's, Christian Frommelt's, Glenn Crytzer's, and of course Michael Steinman's). I listen to Hey Mr. Jesse and browse EMusic and Youtube. I've also found that reading about jazz musicians is a great way to discover new music--for instance, Count Basie has a fantastic autobiography, and there is a new biography of Louis Armstrong that is worth reading, and has a list of 30 essential Armstrong recordings.

Finally, as far as organization goes. I use iTunes to manage my music and JRiver Media Center to DJ. It's annoying to have to go back and forth, but I just can't work up the willpower to move everything over to JRiver. Regardless, I think that my organization scheme would be applicable to most music management software. I use the following fields: BPM (here's an online metronome), rating, comments, and grouping. I use the comment field to note anything peculiar about a track, such as an 8-minute introduction that can be skipped, or an extended drum solo. When I started out, I used the grouping field to describe the track as "lindy," "balboa," "blues," "charleston," etc. But as I gained experience, I realized that this was an inadequate (or irrelevant maybe) way to describe a tune. These days, I list the style of music (classic big band, small group swing, trad. jazz, modern combo) as well as whether there is a vocal (male and/or female) and any prominent instruments. Not that I list "clarinet" in every single Benny Goodman track, just anything that's not immediately obvious. I then create smart playlists that pull up styles, or I can search for tracks using the keywords that I've entered.

So there's my take. I'd be curious if there are other blogs or things that you find helpful. Leave a note in the comments!

Starter albums for the jazz-curious: introduction

I've heard the same advice from many dance teachers, including some big-name instructors: "If you want to get better at dancing, listen to the music often--not just when you're out dancing." I've found it to be true in my own experience as well. Getting familiar with how swing tunes are put together, how different jazz musicians phrase a solo, how breaks work, etc. will help you be more musical in your dancing. It may also motivate you to get better, since you'll start to hear little things in a song and say to yourself, "hey how can I dance to that bit?"

But where to find some good music? Many swing dancers don't really know much of anything about the music they dance to, though I've met some who are curious to learn more. If you fit that bill, I thought I would try to provide a few recommendations to help you get a toe in the water. Over the next several posts, I will make suggestions based on several different "jumping-off" points. Hopefully one of them will more-or-less describe you. Or if you don't fit into any of them but are looking for a recommendation, post a comment or email me and I'll see what I can dig up for you.

I try to suggest albums that have a lot of tunes that you can dance to (as oppose to just 2 or 3) using whatever style(s) you can do. I also try to suggest music that is close enough to something you may already be familiar with, so it won't sound too strange. I provide links to full albums on Amazon, but practically all of this music is also available as electronic downloads from Amazon, EMusic, or iTunes (see my earlier posts about these different websites), so you can also easily cherry pick a few tracks from these albums.

Here are links to the series of posts (all tagged with "starter albums"). If you're...

• ...just learning East Coast Swing (a.k.a., 6-count, jitterbug)...
  
• ...just learning to lindy hop...
• ...getting more into lindy hop...
• ...crazy about Charleston...
  
• ...discovering the world of Balboa...
• ...if Blues is your middle name...
  
• ...looking for some nice jazz to play in the background...
  

Music via the interwebs, Part 4: Other online sources

Besides EMusic, iTunes, and Amazon mp3, what else is out there? There's quite a few services, mostly filling smaller niches in the huge and growing online music market. I don't use any of them very frequently, but here's what I know:

Amie Street. The idea here is that the market determines the price. The more people download the track, the higher the price climbs. You get a deal if you get in on an artist/album/track early. Next thing you know, they'll be setting up a derivatives market so you can bet on how soon the hipsters will mob any particular indie band. If you can do it with mortgages, why not music too?

CD Baby is a service that allows independent artists to market their own music. The site now also allows artists to sell albums in mp3 format. So far as I've seen, it's up to the artist to decide to allow the option or not. And you can't download individual tracks.

Bandcamp is a pretty nifty site that allows independent artists to sell (or distribute for free) mp3s of their music--sort of a next-generation CD Baby. It lets the artist set the price, or lets them choose to let the customer pay whatever they want (the "In Rainbows" model). I ran across the site while browsing the web page of the California Honeydrops, a soul group from San Francisco. Of course, Bandcamp is basically a distribution platform, not a music site for itself--so you can't browse for artists. You'd have to find out about a group through some other route, and then perhaps get re-directed to Bandcamp to grab some of their music.

Smithsonian Global Sound is truly for the music geeks out there, people who are interested in historical recordings, field recordings, truly diverse sounds from around the globe. They have a lot of the original Folkways recordings, including stuff that founder Moses Asch recorded back in the 1940s. All sorts of interesting music on here, including some fantastic blues compilations like this one. Not necessarily a good source for swing dance music, but then you do have wider taste than just jazz, don't you?

Lala is another music service that plays with the standard iTunes pricing model. It allows you to preview an entire track once (rather than just a 30 sec. snippet), and then buy the rights to stream the song online for just $0.10. Actually downloading mp3's costs more--about the same as Amazon mp3. Lala also scans your music library and gives you free online access to any licensed tracks that you already own. (Added 9/27/2009--Thanks Thomas for the tip.)

Jazz Online has a bunch of jazz recordings available for streaming or download, plus a basic but serviceable search engine. The site claims that all of the music is public domain, though I haven't investigated it enough to know whether that claim is true. (Added 9/27/2009.)

Music via the interwebs, Part 3: Amazon mp3

Returning to my reviews of online music sources, let me say a few words about Amazon mp3. This source has two advantages over iTunes: it's slightly cheaper (by about 10 cents per track, $1 or more per album) and ALL of the files are high bit-rate mp3s. Those are both big reasons to shop Amazon.

In terms of the catalog of available music, it seems to be mostly the same as iTunes. Lots of the same obscure tracks are available through both, and I have yet to find a track on one but not the other. (Of course, sometimes neither source has what I need...)

The integrated search engine is good (it's integrated with the rest of Amazon), but the browsing interface is less than stellar. iTunes still has the edge there. My only other complaint with Amazon is that there are very few reviews integrated in with the browsing interface. Not that I even put much stock in them, but it is nice to have something to read if you've stumbled across a new artist.

Music via the interwebs, Part 2: One more thought on EMusic

One more thought about EMusic, specifically using EMusic to build a music collection for DJing. This is an avuncular scolding for would-be DJs out there, maybe with a dash of "do what I say, not what I do" thrown in.

So as I said in my earlier post, EMusic is a good way to ramp up a collection if you are just starting out or looking to see what the view is like from behind the DJ table. And it's also a good way to branch out and discover new music.

BUT....

I think it is a bad idea to be an exclusively EMusic DJ, especially if you are using the (less than stellar) social recommendation aspects of EMusic. If you do, you're going to end up with exactly the same collection as all the other DJs that use it and we would all start to sound homogeneous and boring. It's lesson one of Web 2.0: crowd-sourcing can easily breed group-think.

On its own, EMusic is not a very good tool for learning about music. Sure it is a source for music, but without other resources to learn about musicians and jazz, it's not a good way to actually learn. You can easily blow hours browsing around at random, listening to hundreds of 20 second clips, and not gain anything by it. But if you have some other way of learning about musicians, bands, composers, jazz culture, that sort of thing, then EMusic is a useful tool to have access to.

What are those other ways of learning? Friends, books, maybe the Internet (Swing DJs, Pandora), and of course cd/LP liner notes.

Music via the interwebs, Part 2: EMusic

Part two of my review of various online music sources, this one focused on EMusic. EMusic is a different sort of scheme than iTunes or Amazon, in that it is a flat-rate subscription service. The basic plan is $12 per month for 30 downloads, which works out to 40 cents per track if you use them all. The credits are use-em-or-lose-em, so you do have to poke around on the site every month if you actually want to get your money's worth.

Before I get to my comments, two shameless plugs:
1. If you are an EMusic member and a dj, let me know your user name! I'd like to be EMusic "friends" with you. Post a comment or email me. Here's my profile page, from which you can friend me.
2. If you are considering joining EMusic, just hold on a second. They've got an incentive scheme set up so that if I invite you to join, they give us both a bunch of free tracks. So email me if you are considering joining, and I'll send you an invite, and then we'll have extra tracks to play with. And I'll be your "friend."

Okay so that was me pimping for EMusic. Forgive me--read on, and I will give you an honest critique to make up for it.

Starting with what makes EMusic attractive. First and most obviously, the price is right. On a single track per download basis, it's less than half the price of iTunes. Of course, if you download a Best of Oscar Peterson album, you might blow your monthly allowance of tracks on a single album, which you could get for $10 from iTunes or probably less from Amazon. The price advantage comes if you want to poke around and grab a few tracks from an album here, one from that big old compilation, and a few more from somewhere else. If you are looking to build up your collection of danceable music, this is a good approach.

Second advantage: EMusic has an ever-growing collection of interesting music, lots of independent labels, and lots and lots of jazz and blues. I have yet to find anything that wasn't also on iTunes or Amazon, but considering that those services of gigantic international retailers, that's a bit of an unfair comparison--relative newbie EMusic really isn't doing too bad. Several times I have pissed off local djs by revealing that I've grabbed tracks off EMusic that they spent years and years looking for in record shops--stuff that's the prize of their collections. (Two examples: Clora Bryant, ...Gal with a Horn and many of the Definitive Black & Blue Sessions are on EMusic.)

But, EMusic is far from perfect. I would rank the most important drawback as the quality of the digital files you get when you download a track. Some are perfectly good quality, stuff that is fine to spin at a dance on a nice sound system. Other albums are really lacking, so you do have to be careful.

The other drawbacks to EMusic really have to do with the design of the website, so they are aspects of the service that could be improved, if EMusic has the programming talent to do so. Biggest complaint here is that the search interface is PATHETIC. There's no way to do advanced searches, so if you are browsing a particular artist and want to find a specific track, you have to browse through ALL of their albums. Hopefully EMusic is embarrassed by its lack of a respectable search feature, and is working as hard as it can to improve it. If not, shame on you EMusic, shame.

Along with the search interface, EMusic's social recommendation system leaves a lot to be desired. It's impossible to search for your friends (which is why y'all need to tell me your user names), you can't un-friend other users, and you have zero control over your "neighbors"--ostensibly the users whose download patterns are most similar to yours. C'mon, EMusic. Get with it.

As long as I'm griping, here's one graphic design suggestion (you listening, EMusic?): get rid of the pop-up album reviews. Put the full review somewhere on the page, so that I can read the whole thing, or go back and forth between reading the review and previewing the tracks. Thanks, EMusic ;). Also, it would be nice if the EMusic download manager had the option of loading your music directly into iTunes. The Amazon mp3 download manager does this--it couldn't be too hard to add that little feature, and it would save the trouble of having to copy the files from one folder to another, then delete the originals.

Music via the interwebs, Part 1: iTunes

I acquire by going to record stores like Jazz Record Mart (a wondrous place, but dangerous for the wallet--I can never get out of there without spending about $75), plus every once in a long while a treat from a specialty shop like Mosaic Records. Lately I've also been buying a lot more music online. Initially, I would look for mp3s when I knew of a particular track I wanted, but didn't want to buy the whole album (or couldn't find the album). For instance, if I heard a tune at a dance and asked the DJ what the title was, it's easy to go home and look it up. Lately I've spent more time just exploring online music, as oppose to only making specific, targeted acquisitions.

My three main sources, as you can tell from the links I list in my "One Track Mind"posts, are iTunes, EMusic, and Amazon mp3. Over the next couple posts, I offer my opinion on each of these sites.

Starting with iTunes...

iTunes seriously annoys me, in many ways, but chiefly for their online store. For a long while, the mp3 files sold in the iTunes Online Store had digital rights management (DRM) protection on them, so that you couldn't freely share the files with your friends. Piracy issues aside, it also means that I can't play those files in most other music players other than iTunes.

I've been gradually going through and getting rid of all the DRM'ed AAC files that I've accumulated through iTunes, replacing them with mp3's or whatever the current standard is. I think some (maybe most) of iTunes is now DRM-free, but still their whole scheme really annoys me.

The main attraction of iTunes is convenience (assuming that you too are deeply caught in Apple's web of personal music products). Since I use iTunes to organize my collection, it's easy to pop over into the store and grab a track, and it shows up in my library with no added fiddling. They also have a very large collection of music, and a good search interface. Since it's all integrated into iTunes, it feels more like you're browsing through a database than clicking through web pages. I like how the album reviews and user reviews are integrated into the page, so you can read them and browse through tracks at the same time.

The biggest drawback to iTunes is cost. It's the most expensive source out there, so it's easy to quickly run up a decent sized bill. Other drawbacks were the DRM and the low bit-rate on the files, but I think those are getting to be less of an issue.