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BurstLabs takes on Muxtape
More than likely, you’ve heard of the dubiously legal online mixtape creation tool, Muxtape. If not, well, you need to get out less.
The site, in all of its 2.0-tastic glory, is the perfect vehicle for the budding Lester Bangs of the world to create the blogger-friendliest of blogger-friendly playlists full of songs they have not listened to all the way through, preferring to take Pitchfork’s word for it. Ryan Catbird, of music blog Catbirdseat offers his take on the scene-and-be-scene at his Muxtape.
In the interest of full disclosure, we thought it would be interesting to post our own Muxtapes (isn’t the prevailing attitude toward arbitrarily supplementing the English language amazing these days?). No artifice, embarrassment, or posturing allowed, just the cold, ugly face of our own personal music tastes :
As I spend an insane amount of time looking for music, and lack nothing for self-confidence in my own taste*, I thought I’d do an infrequent post here and there to aid music supervisors in locating that perfect musical backdrop for their project (assuming, of course, they have somehow failed to find what they were looking for in our incomparable catalog).
I want to write music that embodies everything great about this ad.
Clever, well-thought, and perfectly executed. The kind of thing that makes you think “man, I wish I’d thought of that.” F’n brilliant. Kudos to M&C Saatchi. [ms]
Guy Kawasaki’s latest venture, the news aggregator AllTop, is in beta right now.
AllTop is a sexy-fied RSS reader, broken into categories that cater to the Gawker set (of which we wish we were cool enough to be associated with). It will, I’m sure, quickly become my go-to site every morning, as I scan the internet for Domo-kun porn and the occasional bit of breaking news.
In related exciting news, the Burst Labs blog has been selected as one of the trusted purveyors of music industry news on AllTop’s Music feed. If there was ever a reason to step our game up, I think this is it.
It is extremely humbling and exhilarating to even be considered in the same universe as such giants as Stereogum, Coolfer, Hypebot, The Kings of A&R, and hopefully, soon enough, Idolator(hint, hint)… we promise we won’t let it go to our heads. [ms]
There’s always been a strange disconnect between labels and sampling artists. For the longest time, sampling was seen as a crutch, an easy way out. Perhaps it’s a sea change in attitude, but it strikes me as disingenuous to now celebrate what was once criticized, just because it has become financially viable. Especially when the artists that were criticized and belittled for the sampling (A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul) are now
“Best Original Song” was the only award that I had invested any emotional energy into at the Oscars last night. If you have not seen Once and you have any love at all for the creative process of making music, you are doing yourself a disservice. The performance of “Falling Slowly” given by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova last night, while not quite on the emotional scale of the version featured in the movie, made it pretty obvious who the rightful winners should be. And then, lo and behold, the rightful winners won! Cheers, guys!
P.S.- Good on ya, John Stewart, for letting Marketa come back out to finish her acceptance speech. [ms]
The award presentation will be held as part of the SXSW Interactive Conference & Festival March 7-11 in Austin, TX, and we get a ticket and festival pass as an award nominee.
As luck would have it, I just canceled my reservations for this years SXSW Music Festival due to all of the projects on our production schedule here at Burst. But our kickass designer, JD Hooge of Gridplane, will not be able to attend and offered his invitation to me… maybe I’ll have to rethink my travel plans for March if enough of our friends and fans vote for Burst Labs as the People’s Choice Award winner. Hint, hint.
Hey, congratulations to JD and our website’s programming guru, David Knape of Bumpslide. We all have our fingers crossed for you guys! [dh]
It’s taken us a bit longer than we’d hoped, but we really wanted to get you some of the most requested tweaks and didn’t want to compromise on our normal music production. So, after spending the past few months in furious emails back and forth with our web development team, here’s a quick hit list of what’s changed (some of these are covered in the preview video we’ve posted below) :
new Home Page
new About section (including FAQ, Credits, etc.)
new Navigation bar
Log Out displays currently signed-in account
more Recent items at Home Page
all submission forms (Log In, Send To Friend, License This Track, etc.) are now in Flash
expanded live area for previewing Petri Dish tracks in Audio Player
Audio Player keeps track of recently played tracks
tracks that have already been played are darkened in Petri Dish
new Track Details layout
Track Durations (Time) now in list and detail views
Downloads dialog in Flash lists all available formats, stems and edits (coming soon)
License Track form allows for multiple tracks in one submission form
new All Compilations view
Enjoy the walkthrough video below… after 5 or 6 aborted takes I decided to just play it loose and left a few goofs in there (I wasn’t logged in when I attempted to show the new License This Track pop up - just one example!).
And much, much more planned for very soon. First comment below is a list of some of the features we have in the works already, but we absolutely want to know what all of you would like to see… drop us a comment (or an email) and we’ll get to it.
Always fun to see and hear our music being used in cool productions and promos, and this year’s CRT/tanaka online Valentine (What Chocolate Are You?) has a jazz organ background track licensed from our production music catalog.
We’ll have to send any potential Valentine’s Day suitors over there, too, as we’ve been absolutely swamped with music production (and edits and artwork and mixes and plans…) and won’t have time this afternoon to try to top our Huey-Lewis-Tupac-Shakur themed promo from last year.
But hey… hugs, kisses and chocolate from all of us at The Burst Collective! [dh]
What I Liked About The Grammys or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love When People Bomb
I have come to realize that I tend to err on the side of crotchetiness on this blog. While that attitude is sometimes completely valid, it makes me seem like an angry young man, which I don’t believe I am. In that light, I am going to run down for you the things I liked about, well, an otherwise lackluster Grammy celebration.
Now, I know, the Grammys mean about as much to a musician as, well, the American Music Awards mean to a musician, but with a lot of money and a halfway decent reputation, you’d think anyone could put on a semi-entertaining show.
![Burst Labs [Logo]](/wp-content/themes/burstlabs/img/logo.png){kind=logo}
More than likely, you’ve heard of the dubiously legal online mixtape creation tool, Muxtape. If not, well, you need to get out less.
Blue Note records just released “
Always fun to see and hear our music being used in cool productions and promos, and this year’s 
I have come to realize that I tend to err on the side of crotchetiness on this blog. While that attitude is sometimes completely valid, it makes me seem like an angry young man, which I don’t believe I am. In that light, I am going to run down for you the things I liked about, well, an otherwise lackluster Grammy celebration.