A few weeks ago i realised that i had been playing the same songs on my ipod for about the past 4 months. It had gotten to the point where I didn’t even need to take my ipod with me anymore cos i could just sing all the songs in my head. Bloc Party, The Shins, Bell X1, Cold War Kids, as much as i love them…. had just been overplayed.
I’ve been using last.fm for about a year now but had never really gotten into it or at least spent more than 20 minutes looking around the site. But last Saturday I had a terrible hangover and was unable to get off the couch so I spent the day watching cartoons and searching for some new music. Well, last.fm is now my favourite website. From just one click on the John Mayer page i had a list of similar artists, where i found Gavin Degraw. His name rang a few bells in my head as i remembered he did the theme tune to One Tree Hill (One of my guilty tv pleasures from when i was in San Fran). So i got his album and was relatively impressed. A click on his similar artists brought me to Jason Mraz and Ryan Adams, another excellent singer songwriter. After about an hour I had a list of albums comprising of these 3 plus The Libertines, The Kooks, Matchbox Twenty and The Waterboys. That website is so EASY to use, it looks good (very web2.0), it has so much information that it just seems to be endless and its fun to use. The only drawback would be the plethora of ads for James blunt. God damn he’s annoying.
Another website i found was purevolume.com, which is made by the lovely people here at virb. A top quality website but i wasn’t as familiar with it as i was with last.fm so i struggled to really get into it. But it gets top marks for having an excellent xmas album available for free download. I haven’t heard a good xmas album in years and usually its made up of songs from Frank Sinatra, Nat King cole and Mariah carey. This album features the Walkmen (one of my faves), Paper Route, Tokyo Rose and Jesse Malin. The album is available here and is highly recommended. Again, the site had a lot of James Blunt ads, whats with this guy?? and how much money is he spending on advertising??