Thursday, April 27, 2006

Pop Conference

emplive.org - Visit - Education - Pop Conference: "The 2006 Experience Music Project Pop Conference-Seattle - April 27 - 30, 2006" It's the annual Pop Music conference at EMP this weekend. I'm going to try to make it over on Saturday, as a bunch of the panels sound interesting.
I'm trying to find some new songs to download from the iTunes store tonight, but nothing really looks interesting. I wish they had better recommendations, although honestly, my amazon recs are never terribly great for discovering "just been released by a new artist" stuff either. I have lots of thoughts on music recommendations and the new (to me) artist problem that might best be summed up by "I wish there was a way to make a taste template and then match new songs against that." Lots of work has been done in lots of places to define what a "taste template" might be, but I've never seen one that really works. For instance, I love hip hop, but how do I describe the songs that I love and the songs that make me switch the radio station? What attributes do I rank Ride on against Slowdive against Curve, and what of those attributes make me not like a lot of newly released shoegazing?

On a less geeky note, remember the feeling you'd get in grade school the night before the last day of school? Ahhh bliss. Summer vacation never really quite lived to what you might have hoped it would be like, and you knew it, but right before it started was always the greatest time. I liked it even better than Christmas or my birthday. So, I haven't felt this way since I was about 10, and I'm loving it.

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