If you’re here at FreshScouts.com looking for new good music, chances are you’ve heard of Pandora—a website that takes music you already like and finds similar music so you can track down more artists to potentially love.
That’s a great idea and everything, but Pandora isn’t the only place in cyberspace to find new music. Another website, StereoMood.com, has actually figured out a way to tailor playlists to your mood. If you’re in a Jack Johnson mood or a Buddy Guy mood, then use Pandora. But if you’re feeling less specific—happy or relaxed or bummed out—StereoMood is the way to go.
The idea for the site came from four friends in Italy—Giovanni, Daniele, Maurizio, and Eleonora—who concocted the idea as a way to use technology to link music and mood.
“Three years ago when we worked together at mtv.it here in Milan, we decided to provide a new way to listen to music,” says co-founder Eleonora. “We started to investigate what was the best web music service and how it worked. Websites like Hype Machine, Last.FM, and Musicovery inspired us to create a new web application that allows you to listen to music with a new classification based on emotions.”
The site is painfully easy to use; the home page has a huge list of emotions, with the more popular ones appearing in larger font. All you have to do is click on the one that most closely matches your mood, and the playlist pops right up.
One of the good things about these playlist—at least in our opinion—is that you don’t see many mainstream pop hits added to the mix. The music comes from artists all over the world, and that international flair is something Eleonora says they always strived for.
“Every song you will find on StereoMood comes from a selection of the best international music blogs, reachable from the ‘read post’ link on the player. The order in which you will find the songs in every different playlist is counted by an algorithm that tracks their freshness, their listening frequency, their popularity, and the number of tags that the users assigned to them. This algorithm is also able to show the last uploaded songs or the ones users love the most.”
According to Eleonora, the website has grown quite a bit in the short 8 months that it’s been in existence.
“We now receive every day mail and comments on our Facebook and Twitter fan pages. Most of the users express their need of a mobile application to bring StereoMood with them.”
However, plans for expansion stretch beyond just the addition of mobile apps for the iPhone and Android phones. Right now, the website is just a hobby for these four friends in Italy. Eventually, they’re hoping it expands to a point where it can be profitable enough for them to quit their day jobs.
“We want StereoMood to become our main work. We want to create a complete StereoMood team, besides us, to grow up and make the website better. We want to try to sell ad space based on our emotional concept—for example we can make an ad hoc campaign for Kleenex into the ‘feel like crying’ playlist.”
In the meantime, while this innovative website continues to get itself off the ground, listeners can channel their musical mood into an actual, specific playlist. As good as Pandora is, even they can’t do that.
Score one for StereoMood.
Click HERE to check out StereoMood and start discovering new music today!
People have a misunderstanding of Hanson. Sure, the three brothers best known for their pop super-smash “Mmm Bop” are prettier than ever, and a result the overwhelming majority of their fans are female, but their music is surprisingly gender-universal. At the heart of what on the outside appears to just be a handful of handsome siblings lies real talent—seamless harmonies, real chemistry on stage, and actual songwriting talent.
That said, when I took my wife to one of the back-to-back Hanson shows at Chicago’s House of Blues last weekend, the patrons were overwhelmingly female. I can’t remember the last concert I attended where I could be five or six rows back and have an absolutely clear eye-line to the performers. At just under six-feet tall, I had to have been one of the three or four tallest people in the room—an advantage I wouldn’t mind having at future concerts, too.
The H.O.B. had lines down the street long before the scheduled 6:00 opening of the doors, but we found out later that The Brothers had led a charge of 500 fans all over the city of Chicago earlier that afternoon, conveniently ending up at the front doors of the venue. Also, that explained why the band’s rep told us their schedule was too full for an interview. But that didn’t stop myself and my wife—a long, looooong-time fan of Hanson—from hitting up the show, anyway. From the moment we stepped out of the car, we were having a wonderful time.
Well, my wife was having a wonderful time. We caught Taylor and Isaac Hanson in the lobby as they ended their tour through the city and bolted through to the dressing rooms. I was able to stop both of them and introduce my wife, which obviously made her ecstatic and maybe even a little drooly. For the majority of her adolescence, she legitimately thought that she’d be marrying Taylor. To shake his hand was a pubescent dream come true—one that left her almost speechless.
From there, the building opens up straight ahead into a pretty solid little restaurant (the red beans and rice were delicious, by the way), flanked on either side by staircases leading up to the concert floor. The place looks like a dark combination of blues Americana and demented circus, which in my experience has proven to be a rock-solid vibe for all sorts of genres of music. I’ve seen concerts there ranging from Talib Kweli to Marc Broussard to… well, Hanson, and every single time the hall seems to mold into what that particular fan base needs.
In this case what it needed was room for a whole lot of female hormone, which actually proved more annoying than gigantic tattooed frat animals moshing through a rock concert. To my left was a high-school-age girl in an orange dress dancing as though possessed by a demon, and her first pumps to the beat of the song hit me (and a couple of her other neighbors) in the face on more than one occasion. Behind me was a larger woman closer to my own age thundering her bountiful bosom against my shoulder blades. It wasn’t pleasant.
But once Wifey and I found a spot in a throng of reasonably fanatic Hanson fans, the show proved the be extremely enjoyable. The House of Blues rarely fails to deliver, and the Hanson brothers actually put on a really solid show. I say that as a man. “Shout It Out,” the group’s newest record has more than a couple memorable tracks, and having seen several of them live I’m sure they’ll now be even more memorable.
The only question now is whether or not they’ll forgo their soiree with 500 lady friends the next time they’re in Chi City and sit down for a chat. We obviously love the guys to brave all that estrogen. I think we deserve it, don’t you, Hanson?
Lincoln Hall in Chicago is one of the newest venues around and, personally, one of my favorites. With a wide-open space and a living room like atmosphere, every seat is a good seat. But what makes it even better is when they invite great artists like Dave Barnes and Andrew Ripp for a night of music and relaxing.
The show started off with an intimate set from Andrew Ripp with only an acoustic guitar and piano player/slide guitar player. I’ve personally only seen Andrew with a full band, so seeing him in an “unplugged” session was truly an engaging experience. His set included some of the songs from his new album, as well as old favorites such as “The Privileged Life” and a stripped down piano version of “Dresden Wine” from his freshmen release Fifty Miles to Chicago.
When Dave Barnes hit the stage, fans were treated to not only Barnes’ classic stand-up comedy routine, but also songs from his new album What We Want, What We Get. Fans heard the story behind “My Love, My Enemy” and were able to catch a collaborative effort between Barnes and Ripp for “What I Need” (with vocals originally sang by Jonny Lang on the record.) It was like watching two best friends perform side-by-side as Ripp jumped on stage for more than half of the show to help cover the back-up vocals for some of Barnes’ most melodic songs.
Overall, it was a beyond pleasing performance and a great tie in to Andrew Ripp‘s upcoming sophomore album release produced by Dave Barnes. The musical partnership between these two personable musicians is strong and, if you get the chance, make sure you check them out in person sometime soon. They go together better than a peanut butter, banana, chocolate syrup, marshmallow fluff sandwich. And that’s saying a lot.
Listen to What We Want, What We Get by Dave Barnes:
Buy Dave’s album:
Buy Andrew’s album:
