Variety: Spotify Expands Charts to Include Genre and Local Categories. “Spotify has launched a new Charts destination website that includes new Genre and Local charts, in addition to data and tools to give artists and listeners more information on releases.”
Remezcla: Hasta ‘Bajo Is the First Digital & Physical Archive of Puerto Rican Reggaetón. “Patricia Velázquez once tried to search any records of the word ‘reggaetón’ on the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueño’s official website. She came up emptyhanded, so she plotted a way to change this.” I knew what reggae was, obviously, but not reggaetón. Fact Magazine has an extensive overview. I think the next hour or so of RB will be accompanied by this soundtrack.
Want to explore music genres? This newish site sounds like just the ticket. “The result of seven years of work by a polymath Belgian architect named Kwinten Crauwels, Musicmap is almost overwhelming in its comprehensiveness. Genres are color-coded (blue for blues, gospel, and jazz; yellow for rock; red for electronic). Six different kinds of dotted lines show different relationships among 234 sub-genres. Click one, and a description pops up next to a YouTube playlist (with Spotify coming soon).”
“The Dark Side,” a Backstreet Boys fan forum, has gotten a huge amount of digital media and is developing an online archive. “So thanks to a member of our forum, Hayley…, I (Rose) have come into possession of the treasure trove of media. Over a decade of appearances, concerts, you name it, from all over the world!”
Wow! I am really looking forward to this digitizing of Cash Box magazine! “The Swem Library at the College of William & Mary in Virginia has received a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to digitize its entire run of Cash Box, a music trade magazine published from 1942 to 1996. Swem Library is partnering with the Internet Archive, to scan all 190,000 pages of the 163-volume collection and create an online portal for reading and downloading the digital images.” The project was started last month and will be finished by the end of the year.
Bing is predicting the winners of the American Music Awards (AMAs). Hey, I actually know who some of these people are! Wow!
A campaign is underway to preserve the reel-to-reel recordings of Owsley “Bear” Stanley. This is going to be a huge endeavor as there are over 1300 reels and they’re kind of racing against time at this point before the reels degrade. “Although our campaign opens with a goal of $10,000, that’s just the start. The cost of digitally preserving these recordings is estimated to be US $300,000 to US $400,000 to fund two to four years of professional sound engineers’ studio time. Much of the work is a labor of love, but there is simply too much to do and not enough time for just unpaid volunteers.”
The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.
Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.