The Beatles Rock Band

I agree with Daniel Radosh, the writer of the article "While My Guitar Gently Beeps," that Rock Band the Beatles edition has definitely put them back in the forefront of the evolution of music. The Beatles have been a huge success since their first hit, and are still well loved today by many people. They changed the way the world looked at rock, and now they are changing/influencing video games as well. Each new generation, with all its crazy new music, still knows at least one Beatles song. Rock Band is a huge success right now, millions of people have drummed till their legs went numb, and sung til they were red in the face. It is a great game, it is interactive because you can play by yourself, or with up to 3 friends. To release the Beatles edition of Rock Band was a great idea because it reminded everyone of how good they really were. It also reminded people of why we grew to love the Beatles in the first place. Another reason that Rock band is influencing popular music is because it plays a lot of rock. It is nice to see rock coming back into mainstream instead of all the pop, hip-hop, garbage that consumes the air waves. Now that games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero have been released more and more people have been listening to rock. The game itself is selling the artists to the public, not literally, but if you play Rock Band on xbox live you can buy songs by other bands. Bands that only people who like rock have heard of such as one of my favorite Rock Band songs, and favorite bands, "This is Exile" by Whitechapel. Seeing a band like Whitechapel on rock band makes me happy to know that that pop, hip-hop garbage hasnt gained all control of the music world. I hope rock takes back its title and becomes whats popular again, and I think that games such as the Beatles Rock Band and other games have influenced the music world. I also think that slowly, but surely rock will be on the rise once more.

Pandora: Radio for your taste

One of the newest internet radio crazes can be found at Pandora.com. When you first arrive on the homepage you are not sure what to expect. You're probably piecing together the knowledge you have about Pandora, and the box of chaos, and I'm sure you are probably wondering what this website is all about. Well, first you must register with Pandora, this allows you to save your playlists and listen to them anywhere. Once registered, you then get to type in the name of a song, or an artist. When you find the result that you like you click "create playlist," sit back, relax and let the experts at Pandora do the rest. What exactly do these experts do? The whole purpose of the experts are to analyze songs. They analyze these songs and put them in groups according to genre, BPM's, and other groups. Now, back to you, you type in the name of an artist, lets say "Sister Hazel," what Pandora does is it creates a playlist based on the artist, or song, with tons of songs that are similar to it. I have has Pandora for over a year now, I use it on my computer and I have an application for it on my Blackberry. I love Pandora. I think it is amazing how they analyze every part and every detail of each song, and select them into groups. Pandora is a great way to discover new music as well. You are searching for a song that you really like, then a whole bunch of similar sounding songs will come up by other bands, which is exposing you to new material, and expanding your musical taste. Pandora also has a feature where you can dislike/like a song. If you like a song on the playlist it causes Pandora to add more songs similar to that song. It helps to refine your music search, if you dislike a song Pandora knows not to play songs like that and so on.
Pandora has become very popular but I think that if they stopped advertising just with Apple, and advertised everywhere the number of users would skyrocket. Another great thing about Pandora is that it is free to use...for now. As of now Pandora does not cost anything to use. This is a great thing, the only problem is that Pandora does limit its users a little. You can only listen to Pandora for, I think, two hours and you are only allowed to skip over a set number of songs. I think that Pandora definitely could make profit off of their ideas but they would have to change a few things. First they would need to advertise to the masses. Second, if they were to charge a fee for use they would need to not limit the amount of skips and amount of time you can listen. Other than that I see Pandora being very successful in the future.