Here’s a quick overview of tools that I’m using myself to discover music and listen to it.

Souncdloud


This one is obvious because most of the music I post come from here. Most bands have their own accounts to share their tunes, some of which can be downloaded free and legally. I you create an account on Souncloud you will be able to follow people so that you will have their latest uploads in your dashboard. They also have their own desktop app so you don’t need a browser (it’s a nice way of bypassing flash I you don’t like it).

Exfm turns the entire web into your personal music library. As you browse, exfm runs in the background indexing every MP3 file you come across, building a music library for you. exfm will continue to check the sites you’ve visited, adding new music for you to listen to every day.  New in Version 2.0:
You can now Note songs you love and they will be publicly shared on your profile page at ex.fm/YourName. You can also connect your account to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr to both share songs on those sites as well as pull in shared songs from people you follow on those sites. 

The Last.fm iPhone app isn’t available available in New Zealand (even for subscribers!), no doubt due to sticky licensing drama. In fact, unless you’re in the US, UK or Germany you’re out of luck.

Even though I can’t change my blasted username, I like to scrobble what I listen to - so I can track it, compare it, recommend it, see, touch and taste it… Well, maybe not taste it. 

Fortunately, the ex.fm app for iPhone is available in NZ.

The ex.fm app allows you to listen to music you already have on your phone via the ingeniously named “iPod” feature, and it also scrobbles what you listen to if you connect it to your last.fm account (needs wifi or 3g, duh).

Make sure you dig into the other super awesome features of ex.fm - the Chrome plugin will scout pages you visit, collating MP3 URL’s into your own little streaming library. This is then available to stream on your phone too. More about that in my previous post.

Oh, and add me so I can judge your taste in music.

Some other ways to scrobble:

• Pretend you’re American.
  If you’re an Air NZ Airpoints member with a OneSmart account, your card counts as an American Credit Card - opening the door to all sorts of internet joy, including an American iTunes account from which you can download all the good stuff.
• Use another app.
  Rdio is now available in NZ with a 1 week free trial. It has a pretty limited catalogue available, again, probably due to licensing and probably because you will be given the option to actually store the media onto your device (there are different rules if you can stream but not store). Rdio scrobbles to last.fm, and I’m sure there are a handful of others that do similar - hit reply and let us know if you use any.

Last week, while in Los Angeles for work, I explored some of the neighborhoods of the northern LA basin. The contrasts between here and there are obvious, but its buildings in particular always strike me. If New York is a melting pot culturally, then LA is vegetable soup architecturally. It is as if the failed draftsmen of Spain, the 1930’s, ancient Egypt, and Frank Gerhy got together to design a city but couldn’t agree on a template. New developments and old spanish houses. Victorian style duplexes and strip malls. Googie architecture and model homes. Even left in the sun these styles never fully homogenize.

Atop the lumpy backdrop of the Santa Monica Mountains stands a shining monument to LA’s architectural spirit. The Griffith Observatory is a white art deco/neo-classical/Spanish style fort like structure. At night it is lit from below making its cement facade glow white. Two telescope domes flank the building on either side. At its entrance there is an obelisk that features chiseled sculptures of astronomy’s immortals. Approaching the observatory one is forced to bask in its grandeur, a sensation that borders on the comedic, similar to one’s reaction to the first Washington Monument or the Luxor Hotel. Because it’s LA, the grounds also feature a bust of James Dean.

The building draws from many different periods, as art deco tends to, but it’s hard to pinpoint the dominate style. I imagine that in 1933, its architect, John C. Austin saw the contrasting trends developing around him and blended that vegetable soup, added some white paint, and poured the milkly froth into a mold on the tallest hill in Hollywood. He then exclaimed “Take this future draftsmen as a blueprint. Claim your subdivisions and build strange and majestic castles. This is Los Angeles, the world of tomorrow!”

Driving around in that tomorrow world, through its dissimilar architecture and outdated modernism, it’s a shame that no one listened.