Who would’ve though that landing a job as a social media planner in Jam would entail interviewing popstars for the internet.
Late last year I found myself in the hot seat attempting to conduct an interview with none other than Har Mar Superstar (that’s me on the right BTW).
Another Jammer Huw was manning the camera – trying admirably to keep us in frame whilst sipping on a complementary beer.
It’s surprisingly hard to concentrate on a conversation when the only image you have in your mind is a tubby balding man in his underwear. Even harder to concentrate when he touches your inner thigh.
For the uninitiated, this is what he usually looks like:
I have always been impressed with people that are a bit too lazy to learn the real thing, but still very keen on practicing it. Like people becoming the world champion playing Guitar Hero instead of learning how to play the guitar, or just not being able to keep from singing really loudly with a false voice at parties, to their peers’ great appreciation, instead of actually learning how to sing. Some people decide to every day write a blog, instead of actually sitting down to write something of real substance.
Last week the UK Air Guitar Championship was held in the O2 academy in Islington, and the winner, Wildthing37, is being sent on to the world championship in Oulu, Finland, the country who has brought to the world great acts such as tough guys Lordi and cool cats Boomfunk MCs, to go face-to-face against his likes in the ultimate air guitar showdown.
You might sense the sarcasm in my tone of voice, and I must admit that I have never thought highly of people playing Air Guitar. But after looking at this video from TIME’s website I must say that I am pretty impressed! These guys are putting on a way heavier performance than most acts they are imitating.
Maybe next year this Air Guitar virgin will also be on his way to Oulu to face the best of the best in the World Air Guitar championship. I just need to come up with a cool stage name!
David Bowie’s going to be rereleasing his tune “Space Oddity” to mark the 40th anniversary of the moon landings (as you do).
But it’s not just any old rerelease. Instead, it’s a digital remix edition.
Not digital remix in god awful techno nineties way, or even in a filthy dubstep style, but in a way that gives fans the ability to remix the seminal song. You’ll get eight stems to mess about with, so be careful, and don’t ruin the legend.
What’s interesting here is Bowie following in the footsteps of Radiohead (whose Nude and Reckoner remix competitions generated loads of entries and buzz) as well as Jay Z (whose a capella Black Album spawned Danger Mouse’s amazing Grey Album).
This kind of activity obviously works on two levels; you sell more music and you generate more buzz. It’d be great to see more of it, but then again, there are some awful remixes out there…
If you can’t wait to mess around with a Bowie classic, check out the amazing Flight of the Concorde’s series one take on the pop spaceman:
Jam are big fans of the breakthrough act in music consumption Spotify. This blogger is obviously a fan too having come up with a lovely way to share his music collection. Having burnt all my CD’s during the rise of the MiniDisc sadly this is not an option for me.
Moog (pronounced “mogue”, like vogue) is probably the most well known synth manufacturer in the world. The company started tweeting about a month ago, so I thought I’d mark the occasion with a post about the brand.
This company produced one of the most influential bits of kit in pop music history, the “Mini Moog“.
You can probably hear a Mini Moog (or another synth based on it) in any genre of contemporary music. It’s the noodling sound on prog rock, but it’s also the massive bass line in hip hop. It’s got such an immense sound that the only other things you only really need are a rapper and a drum machine.
Despite going bust during the ’80s, Moog now makes things like the Moog guitar, the Little Phatty (I have one of these and it’s amazing) and the Moogerfoogers.
Hobnox “is an online entertainment and publishing platform, a network for creatives and their fans. We unite broadcast-quality web media with cutting edge community-enabling technology.”
Which is great.
But even better is their daringly named “Audiotool”. It’s basically a web app that allows you to interchange bits of virtual gear and create beats.
There’s a couple of drum machines (Roland TR 808 and 909 emulations), a bass synth (Roland TB 303 emulation), a single sound/single mode Tenori-On clone and several effects packaged up to look like Boss compact pedals. They all sound pretty good.
You connect all the bits of gear up visually, not unlike Propellerhead’s“Reason”, and program it all in the same way you would in real life. Which is where it becomes a bit limiting. Unlike Reason, there are no sequencing facilities beyond that on the equipment meaning that if you want to make an ambitious tune, you’d better be good at making on-the-fly changes.
Still, it’s free and could be really good for creating some short loops ready to be dropped into another piece of software.
Since we twittered about it yesterday I’ve been playing with the rather sinisterly titled We are hunted website which is utilising buzz to create a chart of the hottest new artists and songs. In their words they “aggregate social networks, forums, music blogs, Torrents, P2P Networks and Twitter to develop a daily chart of the 99 most popular songs online”. A great concept and really well excuted as the site looks really good and appears to have some science behind it, the geek in me has taken them on their offer to find out more about how it all works.
Their is certainly a great variety of music related sites and applications out there nowadays. For new and possibly unsigned acts their’s Myspace and Bebo, for finding music to fit your specific taste their is Last.fm, for on demand music their is Spotify and now to find out the music with the most buzz on a particular day, week or month then wearehaunted.com is the site to go to.
Here in the Jam team we are a big fan of Spotify, sticking it on when we have to crack on with a presentation or comparing music tastes in the Jam Sounclashs. On first using it we were impressed but we didn’t initially see the social media aspect. However the simple sharing functionality is genius, so simple you can share it anywhere, email, messenger, blog or even create a whole site dedicated to sharing playlists, and that is exactly what people are doing.
Some of our favorites are ShareMyPlaylists, SpotyShare and Listiply (Pansient League have reviewed the top 10), they are great for looking for something new to listen to or sharing your own playlists. Another good site for anyone who is missing Top Of The Pops is Topsify where you can get the most up to date charts. There is even now a Facebook app called Mixifier for sharing playlists.
We have been discussing how in some ways Spotify is similar to Twitter. They are both sticking to what they are good at and allowing people to build the tools to use them in the way they want, whether that be tools to help you tweet, analyze trends or share and find new music.
This all combined is in our opinion bringing back the mix tape culture of my youth, just with less use of a pencil to wind in miles of screwed up tape.
