Category: music
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Music Theory, Language Transfer, and the Thinking Method
I’ve wanted to learn music theory for a number of years, but have never found a source that’s both engaging and educating. That is, until now, thanks to Language Transfer’s music theory course. For a while now, whenever I’ve read an article or post about language learning, someone in the comments invariably praises Language Transfer…
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Record Label Demands on Music Streaming Services
New and potentially disruptive music streaming services are having a hard time breaking into the market, with many analysts blaming their business models and others blaming the contractual demands from labels for the troubles encountered. There are also complaints about the royalties paid to artists and poor revenues of existing services. Michael Robertson–founder of MP3Tunes and…
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Want to be a millionaire pop star? You’re better off buying £64 of lottery tickets than entering the X-Factor.
Let’s assume that if you had a few million pounds, you could probably buy yourself some hit songs from a songwriter, some studio and musician time, plenty of marketing, and almost certainly get yourself a pop career. The question is; is it easier to get yourself into this position (a millionaire pop star) via pure…
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On-Hold Music and Time Perception
With the correct choice of music and by giving the perception of progress customers on-hold in a telephone queue underestimate the time they have been kept waiting and will stay on the line longer before hanging up. Newsweek summarises a number of research studies that have looked at the psychology behind telephone queues and on-hold…
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Busking in the London Underground
Walking through the London Underground I usually don’t give much thought to the designated busking areas. However, the scheme, started by Transport for London in 2003, is surprisingly involved, as I discovered after reading this profile of Mike Muttel, an Underground busker. Muttel’s official busking license, good for one year, hangs visibly from a lanyard…
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The Anatomy of a Hit Song
Two great articles on current research into how artists and songs become hits: Group Think looks at research predicting musical hits using “geo-aware query strings” from file-sharing networks such as Gnutella. The geographic location of an emerging artist is the key to predicting their success […]. “If an artist has the potential to be successful,…
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Paid Lyrics: Advertising in Music
Following on from the (not so) shocking news that stars from Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ were paid a small fortune to smoke on screen, I came across the slightly more shocking news that musicians are getting paid similar amounts for product placement in their lyrics. The practice itself doesn’t surprise me as product placement in music…
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Loud Music Increases Alcohol Consumption
When Gueguen et al. manipulated the music volume in a bar in the west of France, their suspicions were confirmed: louder volumes correlate with higher alcohol consumption. [T]urning the music up so loud that people are forced to shout at each other doesn’t have quite the same beneficial effect on social interactions. Because everyone is…
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Band Names That are Really Hard to Search For
This list of band names that make online searches nigh-on impossible reminds me of McSweeney’s list of inaudible email addresses (via Link Banana). !!! A The And The The The Music
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Gödel, Escher, Bach
On a large number of ‘best of’ or ‘books that changed my life’ lists I always spot Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB), the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter. When my copy arrived at my door recently I was taken aback by this tome and realised that it was going to be a dense read that…