Category: Music

Remember the days when you’d go over to your friend’s house to listen to some music and they’d crank up the tunes on their sound system that filled half the room.  There was a rack of equipment and massive speakers everywhere.    The system made the music sound a live in a way that you never before thought possible.

I’m by no means an audiophile.  I’m sure those larger systems have merit but just never made sense for me to make that kind of investment.

Recently, more of my friends had been buying a the Jawbone Jambox to play music.  It’s a little portable box that you put on a table.  It connects wirelessly with  your iPhone or iPad and makes the music sound incredible.  To me, it sounds as good as those MASSIVE stereo systems.   We use it in the office at Tech Cocktail.

Lauren got me a Jawbone Jambox for my  birthday.  We use it everyday, like when we’re having coffee on the back porch every morning.   Most big stories (like Best Buy) you can find it for $129, which is totally reasonable for what you’re getting.

If you’re looking for an external speaker, I’d highly recommend the Jawbone Jambox.  Here’s the video…

Singer/songwriter and my long time friend Benjamin Hofer is releasing his debut solo album, “Family History” on April 6th.  A week ago, Ben gave me a pre-release stream of the album and I’ve been listening to it non-stop. Ben is an incredibly talented singer, songwriter, and musician.   His folk style fits right into that genre of music that I love to listen to all day long.

As the title would imply, the theme of the songs revolve around telling a family history.  I was emailing with Ben about the album.  He mentioned that the theme kind of emerged as he realized family was really apart of every song that he had written.   The last song on the album, “Huron, SD,” is based on the story of his paternal grandfather.

Head over to his website and hear his first single off the album “Man’s Own Heart.”

Ben funded the $5k to produce the album by doing a campaign on Kickstarter.  I’m so pumped to have been able to support Ben and the production of the album.  Ben’s been talking about wanting to do this album for a while. I’m so excited to see it come to fruition.

Previously, Ben had released an EP by himself called “Three Songs.”  You can download all three songs on his website.  Additionally, when he lived in Florida, he was part of band called the The Northernness, which released a self-titled album.

If you live in the Washington, DC area, I’d recommend checking out the “Family History” Album Release party at the Scooby Doo Mansion on Saturday, April 6th at 7:30pm.  There he’ll be accompanied by a full band, including special guests Wendell Kimbrough and David Parker, who are both featured on the album.  Tickets are only $10.

Per usual, it’s Christmas Eve and my dad and I went out to pick up a last few things.  My mom stayed home and cooked all kinds of delicious amazingness.

While we were out, we stopped at Circuit City and Barnes & Nobled, I noted the extent which they still had CDs out for people to buy  all the latest music.  With the extent that iTunes is dominating as a music retailer and iPods are flying off the shelves, this all kind of surprised me.

Last week, as I was walking around DC, I was using the Pandora App on my iPhone (iTunes Link).  It got me thinking.   At what point will we even move past digital downloads for how we get and store our music?  Why can’t all our music live in the cloud?

Why do I need to download my music to a device?  I’d pay money to just be able to access the music and stream it from wherever I want as long as I want.  Maybe it could be a dime per song.

With the current digital download economy, isn’t the biggest concern piracy?  If all the music lives in the cloud, would it still be a concern?

If all my music lived in the cloud, would we have to worry about how big the hard drive was on our portable devices?