Allmusic.com - Release Dates, Reviews, Track Listings and Discographies. Billboard Online - Trade magazine of the music industry featuring several internationally recognized record charts. Fact Magazine - UK based independent music review site with lots of great interviews and features. NPR Music - A staff favorite, with a plethora of well-written reviews, interviews, podcasts, and more. Tunefind - An index of music and songs appearing in popular TV shows and movies. Not comprehensive, but certainly accurate.
Discover New Music
Every Noise at Once - A one-page map of playable audio samples for more than 1500 music genres, from dance pop to bossa nova to black metal to Turkish new wave to swamp blues to deep opera. Prepare to kill an hour or more with this exhaustive and comprehensive interactive site. Gnoosic- A search engine for music, featuring a mapping system to locate music that is closely (or remotely) related to the artists you love. Music Ninja - A unique music review website, that has dozens of playlists covering all genres and moods. Noon Pacific - A playlist of music from hundreds of music blogs, hand-picked and delivered to your e-mail inbox every week.
Music in Film
Music makes a pretty compelling subject for a film, and our streaming movie database Kanopy has hundreds of music-related features for you to enjoy. Whether it’s a cradle-to-grave story biopic about a famous musician, or an enlightening documentary about a specific music scene, or simply a film with a killer soundtrack, Kanopy has you covered. You can access Kanopy through a variety of devices and platforms, and you get 10 play credits per month. Click here to peruse the music films available and stream (and listen to) a great movie today!
Listen to Music Online
Pandora - Free, personalized music that plays music according to what you love. Bandcamp - Discover amazing new music and directly support the artists who make it. Spotify - Free music, for tablets, smart phones, or computers. Slacker Radio - Hundreds of stations, adapted to your personal taste.
Freegal Pick of the Week
Are you using Freegal? How can you call yourself a music fan and not be using this excellent service that gives you five songs per week – absolutely free that you can keep forever. There are thousands of songs from popular artists (AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson, Miles Davis, Johnny Cash) and tons of new & upcoming bands and musicians to enjoy. There's also tons of the best music in 2018 on Freegal, including Travis Scott's Astroworld, Pistol Annies's newest Interstate Gospel, or Soccer Mommy's Clean - perfect for any music fan.
This week's pick: Barry Walker, Jr. - Diaspora Urkontinent For many, the pedal steel guitar is synonymous with country music; the instrument’s sinuous string bending and crying sound have long distinguished the songs coming out of Nashville and Bakersfield, and its haunting atmospherics make it one of the most identifiable. Barry Walker Jr. is a Corvallis, OR-based multi-instrumentalist, and his approach to the pedal steel is pretty unique, as heard on his latest LP Diaspora Urkontinent. Building his compositions around the warping sound of his instrument, like the shifting of tectonic plates, the sound of the pedal steel in his hands becomes other-worldly, with long passages of ambient sounds, shimmering harmonics, and hypnotic melodies. It’d be easy to classify this album as new age – as a whole the sounds are serene, laid-back, and even wistful at times, yet there’s a bit more to it than just soothing background music. A strangely beautiful haze presides over the album, exemplified by tracks like the echo-saturated “First Life”, and “Ediacaran Moonrise” which has patiently bouncing chord changes that bubble and float around while an eerie single-note melody chimes in the foreground. Walker isn’t afraid to let loose either, and he kicks on the overdrive effects on tracks like “Late Heavy Bombardment” and “Finis Pacificae”, exploring the more percussive aspects of the guitar, and the tremolo-heavy “Jack Hills”, a minimalist voyage that carefully unfolds and weaves its simple notes into the ether. Diaspora Urkontinent shows off the pedal steel at its elastic best, a diverse and contemplative record, and perfect for the balmy winter nights that we enjoy here in the Valley. – Mark, Downtown
