Youth Radio - Topic: music industry

Karaoke Like a Star

lissa — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:13:00 -0500

By the Mobile Action Lab

OAKLAND--Have you ever felt like singing your heart out, but you didn't have the moxie to perform your vocals in front of a live audience? There's an app that lets you karaoke to your favorite song with the option of adding Auto-Tune, which corrects your voice to stay on key. Only when you're sure you have a masterpiece do your friends get to hear it. The app's called StarMaker Karaoke with Auto-Tune, and here's one of the company's founders, Nathan Sedlander, demo-ing how it works.

Youth Radio invited StarMaker's other founder and CEO, Jeff Daniel, to our Oakland studios to bring us behind the scenes in the making of StarMaker. In addition to being potential users, we produce apps through Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab. So our young minds are always seeking lessons from the pros on how to make our products legit.

We get the appeal of StarMaker. It's fun to sing and share with your friends, put in a little Auto-Tune, and even get scored for your performance, which brings out the competitive spirit. But how did this tiny start-up company convince the major record labels to let users butcher the vocal tracks of hit songs by stripping off the original voice and replacing it with their own?

In this clip, Daniel says they had to convince the labels that they'd be building the next generation of lifelong true fans. "To come out with a good recording," he says, "It requires doing it a bunch of times and really getting inside your song." The idea, it seems, is to make sure the song also gets inside you.

Daniel says old business models in the music industry are dying. "Labels, publishers, artists, songwriters," he says, need to work with app developers and come up with new models. "They're not making any money selling records."

Hollow Hip-Hop

denise — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:09:44 -0500

The following originally aired on KCBS.

By Deyante Newson

An innovative genre of music has now become watered down pop music. Hip-hop has taken a turn for the worst.

Nowadays, instead of rappers putting meaning into their music, many songs deal with how much money you have or how “tight” you are.

Back in the day originality and a social message was what made a song good. We had groups like Wu-tang and Outkast. They put out music that teaches or that touches you. In the song “C.R.E.A.M”, In Spectah Deck raps “It’s been 22 long hard years and still struggling/survival got me bugging, but I’m alive on arrival”. This song makes me think of daily life. Deck is letting us know that we shouldn’t give into our circumstances.

Nowadays we have artists like the New Boyz. In their first single they just repeat the phrase “You’re a Jerk” over and over.

The type of music you listen to defines what type of person you are. I want to be the type of person who is defined by music containing morals, intelligence, and wisdom, but that’s just not as available from many artists today.

Maker's New Math: Ch-ch-changes [feat. Roach Gigz]

noah — Fri, 28 May 2010 13:57:48 -0500

Today's episode of Maker's New Math marks the end of the limited series and the beginning of format change! Three segments today. In the first Brandon and Noah look back on the series so far, talking about their favorite episodes and the lessons they've learned.

Then in segment two Roach Gigz, fresh off the release of his mixtape Roachy Balboa, comes in to the studio to talk about how his free mixtape works into his business plan and how he became a Twitter convert.

Then in segment three Noah and Brandon talk about the future of the show, format changes to come, and what we want from you. That's right you: the Maker's New Math fans.

(download mp3)

Next Week: Just one episode, as we peek into the world of aspiring comic book artists at this year's Wondercon.

Links:

Roachy Balboa Mixtape

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While you're at it, you can stalk Noah on Twitter: @areyouthatguy.

50 Cent Talks The Business Of Fear

Devonte Swag — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:24:45 -0500

Fiddy is one of the most successful businessmen in hip hop. Why shouldn't he write his own business and life self help book? 50 Cent talks to BBC America about the 48 Laws of Power, bringing street knowledge into the boardroom, and hip hop's competitiveness.

Forget Deepak Chopra. I want 50 Cent to be my spiritual adviser.

The Business of Webcasting

cfoster — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:34:39 -0500

There are many steps (and sometimes many years) before a good business idea becomes a good business. For the Web radio site Pandora.com, those steps included raising over $1 million from investors and spending five years building the Music Genome Project before it was ready to launch. In the fourth video of our latest Brains and Beakers series, founder Tim Westergren tells us how he made the move from musician to entrepreneur and how he maxed out his personal credit cards in the process.

Previously:

About Brains & Beakers

With support from the National Science Foundation, Youth Radio wants to change the way young people think about science--and scientists. What better way to do that than to make science a media event? Youth Radio joined forces with David Pescovitz from the website Boing Boing and the Institute for the Future to invite a stellar line-up of inventors, engineers, and investigators to our studios in Oakland, Calif. For each segment in the series, our guests provide interactive hands-on demos and then take questions from Youth Radio interviewers.

Interview On Al Jazeera TV: Rappers Seek Islam

fmack — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:34:00 -0500

The stress and complexities that celebrity life in the music industry, and specifically the hip-hop portion of it, are enough to drive a sane man mad. Artists who once starred in music videos surrounded by scantily dressed women and expensive cars, have turned to religion to help keep some sort of balance and self-understanding in their hectic and at times, superficial lives. Imagine the pressure of living up to an image that was created and molded like a gob of clay. Imagine friends you have grown up with, shared laughs and meals with, turning against you out of pure jealousy; or a bucket of crabs trying to pull you down to their level at any cost. Not to mention the industry politics that control an artists ability to actually create and release their own musical vision in a timely manner. Loon, a rap artist from Harlem, who was once all over TV and radio while signed to P. Diddy's Bad Boy Records, has turned to Islam for some of these same reasons. In an interview with famed television network Al Jazeera, Loon says that he is finally at peace with himself. Watching the ear to ear smile Loon easily displays while discussing his new life stage, it is obvious that he is a new and better place. His shaggy beard almost completly disguises him from the rapping "bad boy" (as the reporter refers to him as) he once was.

Previously:

Your Favorite Music's DNA

cfoster — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:05:41 -0500

For our latest Brains and Beakers workshop, Youth Radio hosted Tim Westergren, founder of the online radio service Pandora.com. Tim studied recording technology at Stanford and has worked in the music industry for 20 years as a composer, musician and record producer. In 1999, during the height of the dot-com boom, he noticed that people were listening to more and more music online and wondered if there was a way to create a personalized web radio station that plays only songs that matched an individual listener’s tastes.

To do that, he launched the Music Genome Project – a collection of songs that have been analyzed one by one according to 400 musical attributes, like rhythm, harmony, and instrumentation. Their musical DNA, in other words. When you type a song you like into Pandora, the Web site plays songs with similar DNA. Call it compiling sonic taxonomy, sequencing musical phylogenetics… or just playing one hit after another.

In the first of five videos, Tim talks about how Pandora’s in-house musicians break down every song on the Web site into its musical characteristics. “Any piece of music, whatever the rhythm is, we can understand it through some combination of these attributes,” he says.

About Brains & Beakers

Love Shouldn't Hurt

maeven — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:47:21 -0500

By Natasha Forsberg

In the light of the Chris Brown and Rihanna incident, I have heard many comments and conversations about it at my school. And a lot of them have been about how Rihanna "had it coming" or "deserved it." As a teenager, I'm dumbstruck that my generation thinks that it's okay for a woman to be beaten. What makes me more angry is that most of the people who say this are girls. I can't believe my own gender believes that it's perfectly acceptable to get horribly beaten if they "did something wrong." Interested on this train of thought, I did some research. A recent survey in Boston concluded that 46% of teenagers said that Rihanna was responsible for the incident and that 52% said that the media was treating Chris Brown unfairly compared with 35% that said that the media is treating Rihanna unfairly. The survey also observed that an equal amount of males and females accused Rihanna of destroying Chris Brown's career.

This information, to me, is really upsetting. Do we really live in a world where physically assaulting your girlfriend is perfectly acceptable? If that's the case, then I'm starting to think the civil rights movement for women didn't go anywhere. What shocks me even more is that young women are thinking this. It's sad that many teenage girls are ignorant when it comes to domestic violence. Generally speaking, some girls may have a lot of experiences with domestic violence and just not know it while some may have never been exposed to it whatsoever. Regardless of experiences, young women everywhere should know that domestic violence is not alright and that Chris Brown's actions shouldn't be justified. What if these teens that were surveyed might have friends or family members that are going through an abusive relationship?

To be honest, I don't think this phenomenon is a backlash but more of misunderstanding. Growing up, I hardly had any teaching or training in why domestic violence is bad, so I sort of had to form my own common sense. I worry for other young women. While far from a taboo, domestic violence wasn't exactly a mainstream topic until this incident with these two pop sensations. While these opinions may reflect on America's ignorance, I hope, as a female, that this incident will teach young girls like me that abuse is NOT okay and that if it's happening to you or someone you love, you should stand up.