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. 

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.

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.

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Roachy Balboa Mixtape

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

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. Read more...

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. Read more...

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. Read more...

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.

By Natasha Forsberg