HIGH FIDELITY

One of my favorite bands, for sentimental reasons, is Brooklyn’s Beirut (ok, the reasons are that I was born in Beirut, and spent a long time in Central and Eastern Europe, which their music reminds me of). Here’s a nice live version of one of their best, “Elephant Gun”, recorded during the Studio 104, Masion de Radio sessions:

Elephant Gun

Like 5,000 other people at this very moment, I am trying out the new wordpress app for the iPhone. This is something wordpress users have been eagerly waiting for, as there was no real mobile publishing support for wordpress up until now.
So far, so good….

Great Otis Redding take on the Beatles’ classic:

Day Tripper, alternate take (Otis Redding)

JC firenukes, originally uploaded by Josh Engroff.

Lots of sound, not much vision, and David Bowie was nowhere to be seen. But it was a great 4th on the Hudson, and the humidity provided some cool visual effects, like this celebratory nuclear attack.

Thought I’d post an update on Jango and the social music front. The May Comscore data ranking the top 520 music sites in the US reveals some interesting things:

• Jango is now at spot 32, up 10 slots from the March ‘08 version of this report
• we moved ahead of MP3.com, ilike.com, Audible.com, RollingStone.com, eMusic, Zune.net, and Disney Music
• we will soon pass Billboard.com and Spiralfrog in monthly uniques
• we are more than half the size of Last.fm in the US (bought last year by CBS for $280 million)
• we are #9 of all 520 sites in terms of average minutes per visit (an important measure of user satisfaction), beating AOL Music, Yahoo Music, Pandora, playlist.com, last.fm

And we got here only 7 months after public launch; Last.fm, by comparison, has been around since 2002.

I am estimating our July numbers to be much higher than May and June.

Here’s an excerpt of the Comscore chart, in order of US monthly uniques (in 000s):

Great old ad from I’m guessing the 60s; need to find the exact year:

the-best-part-of-wakin-up-is-folgers-in-your-cup