Let me come out and say that I’m not a fan of The Fray by any means. I found How To Save A Life incessantly boring and don’t really feel they have variety to their music, ie their songs all sound the same. That said, I have been listening to You Found Me quite a lot for the last few days, in part because of their cross-promotional efforts (or convergence, as some would label it) with the season five promo for Lost, launched late last year on iTunes.

Edit: As always, Wordpress has embedding issues, so the video can be found here.

Call it a halo effect if you will, but I think The Fray benefited greatly by associating themselves with Lost, and this video is way better than their “official” music video. As of the time of writing, the song is #14 on iTunes (where they first debuted, and I’m pretty sure they were in the top 10 in late 2008, no small accomplishment for them.

It’s nice to see a band like The Fray trying to push the edges of the music industry and even latching on to Lost for success. Sure bands like Phantom Planet did it with California on The O.C and to some extent Peter Bjorn and John had their single Young Folks shoot to popularity after being featured on Gossip Girl, but it would be interesting to see how future convergences and/or mash ups work for the music industry as a whole, and for bands in particular, and if they are able to leverage it beyond just a feature on the show.

Songbird Logo

I’m pretty obsessive about my music. I like the tags to be right, the cd cover image to be right, and all information should be correct. Windows Media Player does a good job of playing music, but not storing it as a library. Mediamonkey does the library function well, but doesn’t have enough worthwhile features for me to pay for it’s full functionality. iTunes… well, let’s just say if iTunes disappeared off the face of this earth, I wouldn’t be sorry.

Enter Songbird. The best way to describe it? Songbird takes the best features of the other media players (alright, I guess iTunes may have one), and combines to form what I feel is the best media player and manager around. It even made #8 of the Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008 on ReadWriteWeb. There are many reasons why Songbird is just awesome, here are a few:

1) Add-ons and Plugins
Songbird is like the Firefox of media players. The applications you can add on are incredible. Take a look at my screenshot. The mediaflow (like iTune’s coverflow) looks impressive, artist information is available at the bottom, and to the right is a customisable panel where you can put anything from your Last.fm tracks, recommendations for similar artists or lyrics for that particular song. Lifehacker has a list of the Killer Add Ons that you will want to install.

Songbird - Plugins

2) Integrated Music Discovery
Something that Songbird has embedded, is The Hype Machine, which lets you search the latest and most popular music on the internet. The amount of new tracks I’ve discovered and listened to from The Hype Machine is astounding, and I play with it for a couple of minutes every time I open Songbird.

3) Tabs
Surf the internet, right from your media player. That’s right, you heard me. Songbird has tabs. So you can open a tab and check your email right from within Songbird, while your music is playing. How about that for some cool functionality?

Songbird - Tabs

4) Character
When I tried to change the theme/skin of my Songbird programme, it wasn’t listed as a theme or skin. I was asked if I wanted to change “feathers”. How’s that for an application that has a little bit of quirkiness?

I love Songbird and you should really give it a go. If you’re ready to try, you can download it from their website. If you need more convincing, how about checking out 10 Things Songbird Does That iTunes Can’t?

[image credits: Songbird logo]

My Last.fm Profile

So what I want to tell you about on this week’s Music Mondays column, is obviously, Last.fm

That’s me on Last.fm. I’ve been a member since October 2006 and have listened to just over 10,000 songs. I’m pretty sure there’s more than that, but a lot of my music consumption is over the iPod, which doesn’t sync very well with Last.fm.

Primarily, Last.fm allows you to “scrobble” music to your Last.fm profile. Whether you listen to music on iTunes (boo!) or Windows Media Player, your tracks get automatically added to your profile, and so you’d get a list of your recently listened tracks like this:

Recently Listened Tracks

Looking at this it’s apparent I’m still in a Jack’s Mannequin and Jason Mraz mood, and that I’ve listened to Comics Smash, a weekly comics podcast.

But that’s not enough, how about all the tracks and artists I’ve listened to this week?

Top Tracks This Week

Top Artists This Week

Still very apparent that I’m in a Mraz/JM kinda mood. But hey, remember I’ve listened to over ten thousand tracks over the last two years? How about a breakdown of those? Yup, you can get them too.

Top Tracks Overall

Top Artists Overall

Interestingly, many of my top tracks overall are songs that were popular during my internship at MTV. Causation or correlation? Top artists overall is a little of a surprise even to me. I expect Mraz, Fall Out Boy and Jack’s Mannequin to be in there, but Jesse McCartney and The Hush Sound were slight surprises. (I have sampled all of Jesse McCartney’s albums as part of programming on Campus Radio, and his new album is actually pretty good!)

One other real fun feature I like, is how Last.fm “calculates” your musical compatibility with other users, for example, the compatibility between me and user “mrazmrazmraz” is, no surprise, very high:

Musical Compatibility

I find this useful for two reasons:

1. You get to find people who like the same music as you fairly easily
2. You get an idea of what artists you might like, just by browsing someone else’s profile with a high compatibility rating.

For example, if someone stumble’s upon my profile and likes 8 out of the top 10 overall artists that I’ve listened to, chances are he’ll like the other two as well, should he decide to give them a try.

Lately, I’ve been finding out that Last.fm’s social aspect is really strong. I was able to figure out that Metro Station was playing in Toronto even when it wasn’t on their MySpace page as well as recorded rare tracks from other Jason Mraz concerts. The ability to just link up with people on the site is amazing.

Are you on Last.fm? Which features do you like best? What do you use it for other than scrobbling tracks?

If you’re on Last.fm and want to connect, I am, as always uniquefrequency

This week’s Music Monday is going to be short because I’ve been in bed all weekend nursing a cold and a bad throat, but let’s get to it!

I was shopping at the mall (or what passes off as a mall in Kingston), the other day and was appalled to see cds being sold for $18 (I’m talking about new releases) which translates to about $24 in Singaporean dollars. Fully armed with the knowledge that the average album price on iTunes is $9.99, why in the world do these retailers think we’re going to shell out double of that, for a physical copy?

I mean I grew up buying cds and I still like having it to hold, but that cd isn’t worth an extra $9. (In fact, I went home and purchased the Katy Perry album off iTunes instead of buying it at the store. But that brings us to iTune’s DRM problem, which another story for another day…)

When will record labels realise that cds are very quickly going the way of the dinosaur? Being able to easily download music is only part of the piracy issue. The other part is that the labels and retailers are just making it easier to engage in piracy, rather than to pay some money for it. The reason why I’m spending more money on music here than back home is because they have cds priced between $9-11.

So out of curiosity, when was the last time you actually bought a physical cd? Are you comfortable with the idea of going totally digital? (ie: no physical cd at all). Let me know what you think.

Oh and an update: Remember how I was bummed about missing Metro Station? Well I found out on Last.fm that they’re playing in Toronto on the 26th of October, and my ticket arrived in the mail yesterday. Psyched!