Expand your ears and mine!!

How many times can i hear offspring and just have a great time? almost never anymore but if you asked me that in DIFFERENT STORY High School. It was great having one band or one genre sculpt me into who i was at any moment in time! I dressed and looked like the people i listened too unfortunately i didn't have the maturity or experience to realize that i wasn't thinking like them. While offspring was punk or metal or whatever you wanted to call it they wore crazy hair and tight pants punk shirts and talked about all kinds of shit. The difference is though it was just lyrics moreover the artist themselves had much more broad prospective about what was going on than just music, what I'm trying to get at is i kept myself from other arts like hip hop, rap, reggae, funk, blue grass, blues acoustic on and on the list goes of different types of styles of music that have literally taught me how to act in life and how to treat other people and how to be a hard ass gangsta and "who gives a fuck about hoes?" know what I'm saying?

The following are a couple of things/sites that may help you expand your ears and hear new music you have never heard before.

Pandora internet radio was the first place where i got good recommendations about music i already like. What makes pandora different is while you're creating youre profile and picking artists and songs those songs have properties (meta data) which not only record that the genre is "hip hop" but that the artist is someone like "living legends" and in their meta data there is more information as far as the concepts used to create lyrics, is it more poetic? positive? more west coast influenced? or what city is it from who do others relate them with. what instruments were used to make the beats and as far as genres like blue grass they take the influences there too, the bass the melody's and guitars or banjos used... all of these things are taken into account and relationships are made in the "Genome" project that Pandora created, linking all the similar music so now when a recommendation is made its an actual recommendation to a song that has something like a 80% success rate.... as far as i was concerned. Pandora has grown since 2006 when i was a member... which only means its getting bigger and better.




PureVolume This site is mostly for Punk alternative music, but here you can go find a band you hardly know or they are very small and will usually have lots of tracks (myspace is taking over) but purevolume still has some goodies and its alot more underground and music centric.





Grooveshark well groove shark is a really cool concept, although I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around the whole idea. For the most part i upload my music (by having sharkbite running it allows people to see my music and myself theirs and listen to) on the site and others upload theirs. so on the site you go browse or search peoples profiles and different palylists (playlists are made to listen to on listen.grooveshark ) you can listen to these playlists and songs and download them as well... the catch i believe is there is a price no matter what on the songs.... so you get a cut and the site gets a cut..... ummmm i just listen to music and pirate somewhere else. They are still growing and adding functionality all the time, they recently added a "favorites" which allows you to get recommendations like pandora uh oh! on listen.grooveshark you can browse for any artist or song and if people have shark bite running it will let you listen and you can drag and add to playlists or mark as favorite (this is my new pandora) because there is no force listening to!!!!!