To celebrate the blog marking its one-year mark this month, I looked back on those early entries and was greatly dismayed to find that many of the youtube.com videos I had linked to throughout the past 12 months have been taken down. The Video of the Day (and many video playlists I’ve created) have become dead links all over the blog. I guess I should have expected this, as I know that the licensing crackdown is always gaining momentum online—heck, that’s why I chose to link to youtube.com, rather than post my own MP3 files like so many failed, amateur music bloggers have attempted throughout the years. I was not about to get shut down! Hence, I spent the better part of today (only 11 hours!) looking into improving functionality of this here blog, including, but not limited to, user-friendly playlist options.
But, alack, alack, alack, youtube.com is not the answer, though for the past year it was the solution. Youtube.com was great for a big reason: it almost ALWAYS had the song I was looking for available (though quality varied WIDELY), playlists were easy to make, and embedding was a cinch. And what a perk to be able to have music videos as well! So, now, I’m in the market for an online service to replace my youtube.com links at the end of each blog entry, that is, a service that can directly expose my readers to the full track or entire playlist of each blog entry.
What do I need exactly, you ask? I need: (1) A legal way to make playlists that a user can actually hear the full track of each song selection, like internet radio and I am the DJ; (2) a legal way to post a link where a user can listen to the full track of an individual song; (3) a wide range of artists, genres, and general selection, so that this one service will be the only service I have to turn to for my daily blogging needs. Does this even exist? Any suggestions? Any feedback? Any comments? I could really use the help on this one. I’m looking into iLike.com, grooveshark.com, and playlist.com, and I’ll be testing them all day tomorrow and Monday to get a better sense of if they really do everything that I need.
In the meantime, my blog entries won’t have any links—mainly, I don’t see the point of doing the work towards finding each youtube.com video if my links will be dead in a month. Hopefully this linkless life won’t last long, and when I find a more permanent solution to my problem, I am promising to go back through every single previous blog entry from the past year and update all links to songs and playlists. That will be a bad week or two, but it’s of course worth it to have that kind of functionality in the blog’s archives as well as the future blog.
So, getting back to the music!!: here are the add-ons Kristen Bayusik over at WNHU has chosen for her incredible weekly playlist during September 2010. The original post with the full playlist for the month of September can be found here. These “add-ons” are rotated into that core playlist; in other words, five songs are replaced each week with these new selections:
Week of 9/6 Add-Ons:
Ray Lamontagne and the Pariah Dogs- “Beg Steal or Borrow”
Versus- “Pink Valhalla”
Wavves- “King of the Beach”
Jaill- “Everyone’s Hip”
The Books- “I Didn’t Know That”
Week of 9/13 Add-Ons:
Weezer- “Memories”
Steel Train- “Turnpike Ghost”
Street Dogs- “Rattle and Roll”
The Vaselines- “Sex with an X”
Menomena- “Five Little Rooms”
Week of 9/20 Add-Ons:
Jimmy Eat World- “My Best Theory”
Interpol- “Barricade”
Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s- “New York City Hotel Blues”
Atmosphere- “Freefallin”
Superchunk- “Digging for Something”