If you are a classical music lover, 8tracks.com offers many great playlists. They are perfect for inspiration and/or background for study. Here are some recommendations:
evening: an excellent piano oriented mix. Lots of Chopin and French impressionist music. It is 47 minutes long and has eleven tracks, including a nice improvisation on Satie’s Gynopedie.
The Violin: this 8track list centers itself around the violin tunes Sherlock Holmes presumably played as he pondered his cases. Bach, Paganini, Vivaldi, wonderful stuff. Nine tracks; fifty minutes.
Music for Plants: lots of beautiful string ensemble content here, including a nice oboe concerto, a piano version of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (tracklist here).
Almost a lullaby: A top flight classical playlist mix that includes Edward McDowell’s rarely played piano piece To a Wild Rose and Chopin’s wonderful B flat minor Nocturne. Eight tracks; 26 minutes.
Mot just walzes. Lovely waltzes: Blue Danube; Under Paris Skies; Shostakovich’s Jazz Waltz. Great pieces. They’ll make you happy. 17 tracks; almost one hour and twenty minutes.
Forgotten Kingdom is a soundtrack oriented classical playlist (tracklist here). I’m still looking for a word to characterize this kind of music: rich orchestral, but not traditionally classical. Anyway, the tunes are excellent and that’s what counts. 50 tracks; around two and a half hours.
Off to war. A war movie soundtrack oriented list. Great soundtracks such as John Williams’ The Journey to Himmel Street and a semi-orchestral rendition of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
At the ballet. Yup, ballet music: Brahms; Saint Saens; Tchaikovsky. One hour and ten minutes; 16 tracks.
There are also my lists: a classical piano mix, which includes performances by me, and The Beautiful Time, which foregrounds late 19th and early 20th-century masterpieces. Enjoy . . .
Meanwhile I was skulking around plug.dj rooms again, trying to figure out from which countries the most popular rooms originate. Then I started having trouble getting into the site, although I did get into one:
Herdyn: The administrators of this room hail from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It describes itself as “only for Fans of eSuba Herdyn,” but I managed to slip in and enjoy the music. “Herdyn” I presume is Pavel “Herdyn” Mikeš, celebrity streamer and double champion on the League of Legends gaming site. He is an “elo top laner” (whatever that means; help me out here). eSuba means “play with soul.”
More room national origins when I can lurk some more.
In Spotify news, here’s a Spotify application called Outside Hacks that makes Outside Lands festival recommendations for you based on whatever you are listening to on Spotify. Headliners for the August 8-10 event in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park will include Kanye West, Tom Petty, the Arctic Monkeys, and about one hundred other groups, as far as I can count.
Finally, stock market watchers continue to pair Amazon and Pandora Media together, and the stocks of both companies continue to decline. “Shares of Pandora Media fell more than 10% on Friday on news of another profitless quarter,”reports Time. Ten percent for Amazon too, after it disclosed bigger than anticipated losses. “Potential profits just won’t cut it anymore in this market. Take note, Twitter,” the article notes. Does this mean more and more social music apps being absorbed by the big computer, ISPs, and search engine companies? I hope not, but . . .
We cover social music sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.
