Michelle’s Rundown: Music & Moodstreaming
By Michelle DeForest.Last I checked, Coldplay’s Viva La Vida (released yesterday in the US) is rocking the top of the iTunes Album chart, RcrdLbl is hunting for the official Song of The Summer, and Getty Images and the Barbarian Group are Moodstreaming.
Coldplay, “Violet Hill”
Yesterday marked the US release of Coldplay’s latest album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. I just bought the album from iTunes, and I’m listening to it all the way through for the first time as I write this post. Other than being great blog writing music, I have yet to form any deep conclusions about it. For those also exploring the album, what do you think? Any favorite song popping out? I always find that my favorite song on an album is usually never a single.
Speaking of singles, I’m always checking out RcrdLbl to find music videos that aren’t on my radar (read: videos not served to me on a silver platter via my Tumblr dashboard). It seems that they are searching for this year’s Song of the Summer, and I can’t blame them. The summer pop anthem always stays with us, and while sometimes it’s a song that makes you cringe 10 years later, other times it brings back a flood of amazing memories.
This time last year I was belting out Umbrella while riding in Alex’s BMW convertible on our daily lunch hour trip to Whole Foods. This year, nothing’s quite caught on, but yesterday Rcrd Lbl posted a potential candidate that I’m starting to think could have those summer legs.
Estelle feat. Kanye West - “American Boy”
Basically it boils down to the folks over at RcrdLbl being concerned that it’s mid-June, and that song that we replay incessantly every summer hasn’t popped yet. They are completely justified in their concern, so if you think you have it figured out, head on over there to proclaim it, and if you call it right maybe you’ll get a bag of cookies. As of right now, they’ve given “American Boy” a 70% chance of claiming the title, and while it’s catchy (who doesn’t wish to have Kanye in one of their songs to boost the “single” factor), I’m not sure it’s the one.
As for “the one,” let’s talk about picking music to fit with a video. A soundtrack can cause people to latch onto a video that otherwise might not make such an impact, and with rights issues this becomes such a difficult task unless your BFF is a genius composer that owes you a lifetime of favors and has no day job.
At the Webby Film and Video after party I was introduced to an interesting visual solution. Our friends over at The Barbarian Group and Getty Images premiered Moodstream. On the most basic level it’s a photo/video/music discovery tool wrapped into an interactive playground that looks amazing full screen on a large monitor. You pick your “mood” either through presets, or by defining slider bars, and images and music are introduced. The image, footage, and track ID numbers link out to Getty Images and Pump Audio.
Wondering how this could be useful, I phoned my friend Danielle over at Getty Images, and she explained a bit more about what Pump Audio is meant for. She let me know about an interesting feature where you can upload a low-res video file (up to 20mb), and then try out different music against it before purchasing the download and/or the streaming license (you have to be signed in to use this feature). I went through all the steps of picking song, creating an account, to navigating through the purchase menu, and the UI was extremely smooth (plus the prices seemed really reasonable for web video).
If you’ve been searching for that perfect song to fit with your rockin’ video, try out Moodstream + Pump Audio, and let me know what you think. And even if you aren’t searching for a song, Moodstream is still really fun to play with.
