Your Music Genre Isn't Dead

Well, not necessarily. I suppose if you're into the baroque movement, there isn't a whole lot of innovation going on for that right now, but if you're a fan of something slightly more recent and some of the groups that appear on the previously-mentioned Wolfgang's Vault interest you, then I have the the website for you. Pandora.

Now, this site isn't just for lovers of oldies. You can learn about a lot of current-day mainstream hits and get a pretty thorough tour of the various underground scenes as well. Pandora aims to find music suited directly to your tastes and play that music for you in a streaming radio format.

Here's how it works: you register an account (it's free), then you create "stations." A station can be based on an artist, a specific song, or a genre. Pandora then accesses a vast database of carefully cataloged music and attempts to play other songs that will fit your musical taste defined by whatever song/artist/genre that station is formed from. So, you can start a Beatles station, for example, and expect to hear many other bands, new and old, that share some part of their style with the Beatles.

It's not perfect, but it's constantly being updated and it does have useful feedback devices. First of all, if you hear a song you like, you can give it a thumbs-up. Songs with a good rating tend to pop up in your play list again and again. If you hear a song you dislike, you can give it a thumbs down. It'll be gone for good at that point. You can also bookmark artists and songs so you can remember them later and proceed directly to sites where you can buy their albums. Finally, they've recently introduced a feature that allows you to link your Pandora account to your Facebook account so your friends can see what you're listening to. Pandora also has some minor networking features built in.

Give it a try. You can even create mix stations that combine two or more of your previously defined stations so that you get a wider range of music. I find that works best.

Wolfgang's Vault

The Wolfgang's Vault site has been up for a while, and it's a tremendous resource for hearing classic rock (and other styles of music) performances that you'd never encountered before.

"Wolfgang" was the real first name of the man known as Bill Graham (1931-91), the legendary promoter who, to a large degree, is responsible for the rock concert as we know it. He accumulated a large archive of performances, and they've been prepared for streaming through the Wolfgang's Vault site.

The Concert Vault is where to find everything from a 1965 show by Jefferson Airplane, before Grace Slick joined the band, to a handful of 21st century concerts (obviously the collection extended beyond Bill's death). If A Flock of Seagulls is your thing, that one-hit '80s wonder is on the list, too.

My personal favorite is a Pink Floyd show on April 29, 1970, at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. I've had a bootleg of the concert for a number of years, but the Wolfgang's vault version sounds a heck of a lot better. The performance is from the pre-"The Dark Side of the Moon" era, when Pink Floyd did quite a bit of improvisation compared with the closely choreographed shows of later years.

Some of the shows also are available for download, for not too much money. So if you want to hear Peter Frampton as he really sounded live - as opposed to the augmentation that resulted in "Frampton Comes Alive" - this is the place to look.