Music

As of today, Zound Industries is officially called the Marshall Group following its acquisition of Marshall Amplification. Zound had used the British amp manufacturer’s branding for its headphones and speakers for over a decade.

Check out my March interview with Marshall Group CEO Jeremy de Maillard for more details on the merger.

Did you know SiriusXM was a merger of Sirius and XM, which were incompatible satellite radio services, and lots of cars out there with older Sirius receivers still can’t get the full lineup of stations? I got into it with CEO Jennifer Witz on Decoder last week, and mentioned that people have been asking for the popular Road Trip Radio station to be moved to the Sirius bands for years now.

Jennifer promised me she’d look into it, and just emailed me with an update: Road Trip Radio is moving to channel 105 for two weeks starting on June 30th as a “pop-up channel” for the summer. Just two weeks though — what do we have to do to make it permanent?

Clark’s video on YouTube has a nice, simple overview of the phenomenon and shows how to take advantage of them on a guitar. His explanation starts at the minute mark.

Basically, when you play harmonics on a guitar, you’re isolating overtones — resonant frequencies higher than what’s called the fundamental frequency of a string.

Kaytranada did make a few stops in between, with Grammy wins and Grammy losses (to Beyoncé), his 2016 debut album 99.9%, and the Wiz-inspired Coachella show a few weeks ago.

But before he was a magazine cover story, most of us found out about “Kaytradamus” from his SoundCloud remixes.

Turns out he wasn’t faking it during the WWDC keynote. From John Gruber’s live The Talk Show:

Kenny Log-ins is a real website that will make real, secure passwords for you based on Kenny Loggins lyrics (via Boing Boing).

It does exactly what it needs to: you get three options (“Danger Zone” is the weakest, of course) for increasingly-secure, randomly-generated passwords with embedded lyrics. Then you can be footloose while playin’ with the boys, knowing Loggins has your log-ins.

If you sort Reddit’s r/all page by top posts of all time, the number one spot is held by an old picture of Rick Astley riding a bicycle... posted by Astley himself.

The post got around 439,000 upvotes. As it hit the 250,000 upvote mark, Astley commented, “Wtf 🤣🙏.” Don’t worry, none of these links is a Rick roll. Technically.

The closing moments of Succession’s series finale were backed by a stunning piece of music from composer Nicholas Britell, and now you can listen to that song and the rest of the season 4 soundtrack on the music streaming service of your choice. Britell also shared a video of him playing the song solo on piano, and it’s just as good.

By the way, did you know that Britell composed the incredible music for Andor? He’s worked on some amazing stuff.

When this “Nighttime at Jabba’s Palace” lo-fi soundtrack was shared in Slack, I made fun of it. But I’ve been listening to it for the past 30 minutes — it’s actually pretty good?

Decked out in a shade of “green” best described as “Master Chief pancakes into the plateau,” this Zune 8 lacks both the badass green Twin Peaks effect of the original brown Zune and the sophistication of the Zune HD that came after. But a Zune is a Zune, right? May the best Zune-head win.

In coordination with the release of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (and calling back this deleted scene from the second movie), Microsoft is giving away this unopened 8GB “green” Zune to a US resident over the age of 18.

No, it’s not a big-boy Zune 80GB or OLED touchscreen-equipped Zune HD, and there are no promises it will even work, but if you want to join the Zune squad (a real thing that exists, I promise), then this is your ticket in.

Yes, it has been 10 years since Get Lucky came out.

The Daft Punk duo split up in 2021, but they have fresh, previously unreleased material for you to listen to on a 10th Anniversary Edition of their fourth and final studio album, like this demo and animated music video for “Infinity Repeating.”

You can stream the album on Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, and other services, or head to Daft Punk’s website to snag a physical copy (vinyl or CD — no tapes) and associated merch.

Online pop music fans have been in a tizzy the past few days over rumors that Flatiron Books was planning to publish a high-profile book about, as the Times put it, “a pop culture phenomenon.” A leading theory was that Taylor Swift might be the subject. The book’s release date of July 9th is, as the Swifties will know, featured prominently in Swift’s song Last Kiss.

Alas, Flatiron has quashed that rumor: The July 9th release is called Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record of BTS, and it’s about — you guessed it — BTS. (July 9th is also a significant day for the BTS Army; it’s the day of the fandom’s official founding.)

Good news for those who don’t know your Bach from your Offenbach — Shazam now works with Apple Music Classical on iPhone.

As per the Shazam version 15.33 release notes:

You can now open classical songs from Shazam in the Apple Music Classical app. Simply Shazam or search for a classical song, tap the menu icon on the track page and select “Open in Classical.”

I am, of course, talking about the classic Final Fantasy VIII. The original game featured incredible music from composer Nobuo Uematsu, and now the folks at OverClocked Remix have taken a stab at, well, remixing it. SeeDs of Pandora is the 78th arrangement album from the collective, and also the largest, with a whopping 80 tracks. You can check it out right here. In the words of Squall: “...”

It’s that special time when Bandcamp takes a brief holiday from its usual commission, continuing a pandemic tradition that is now stretching into 2023.

Bandcamp:

On the first Friday of the month since March of 2020, we’ve waived our revenue share to help support artists on Bandcamp. Over the course of just those 27 days, fans have paid artists and labels more than $95 million USD. If you’re among the nearly 1.5 million fans who have participated, thank you.

Everything about AI music is incredible disrespectful to everyone involved, including the listener, and it’s never going back in the bottle. I love it.

Sadly, I was not able to work Laser Bong into this episode, but I’ll keep working at it.

In the past thirty years the key change has practically disappeared from songs on the Billboard Hot 100. Our friends over at Switched on Pop spoke with Chris Dalla Riva about why and it turns out writing and recording songs digitally has an awful lot to do with it.

Blink-182 is stepping in on Sunday after Frank Ocean dropped out due to injuries. You can watch livestreams from six stages all weekend on the Coachella channel on YouTube starting tonight at 7PM ET / 4PM PT. And if you want to catch up on some of the best moments from last weekend, check out Coachella’s highlights playlist.

Wow.

Then join me in listening to this theme from the approach on the elephant-like Divine Beast Vah Ruta in Zora’s Domain. Years later, that thrilling sequence with Prince Sidon remains one of my favorite parts of the game, and the sweeping orchestra backing it all up is a big part of why it’s so memorable. Hopefully Link gets more great moments with Sidon in Tears of the Kingdom.

Apple’s CEO was spotted at Coachella this weekend alongside Apple Music leader Eddy Cue. Apparently he’s something of a regular. Do you think he stuck around for Frank Ocean?

The first of the two Coachella concert weekends is about to start, and for those who couldn’t go (or are too old to find the idea appealing, or who bought an NFT but lost access to it in the FTX crash), YouTube is, as usual, streaming the event.

This year there are six feeds to choose from, and you can see the full schedule right here. I’ll probably check out Kaytranada from the Outdoor Theatre around 10:30PM ET.