Ryan Book, The Music Times

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  • Super Bowl's Most Shazamed Songs: What Commercial Soundtracks Got Most Interest? Car Commercials Do Best

    Advertisers paid more than $4.5 million per 30 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl last night so they like to know that their wares get people's attention. One way to do this is to examine what soundtracks get Shazamed, or searched using music identification service Shazam. Last night's most Shazamed moments came during the halftime show (more on that later) but outside of that it looked like New York songwriter Marc Scibilia induced the most curiosity with his rendition of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" featured during a Jeep commercial.

  • Pirate Bay Back Online with New Logo and New Moldovan Home Two Months after Swedish Police Raid

    "You can't keep a good pirate down" may or may not have been the moral of the Pirates of The Caribbean film series but law enforcement around the world hasn't been able to keep The Pirate Bay down, that's for sure. The torrenting site was believed to have been crushed when Swedish police raided its data center in Stockholm at the beginning of December, but administrators behind the site declared a two-month period by the end of which the service would have resurrected. They beat the deadline by one day, and probably just for dramatic effect.

  • 10 Super Bowl Halftime Show Stages: Ranking the Platforms of Madonna, Beyoncé, Bruno Mars and More

    The Super Bowl Halftime Show often benefits from a great performance onstage. Sometimes. But knowing the much of the audio is prerecorded kind of takes some of the fun out of it. That's why more often than not our final verdict on the big game's big entertainment (especially in recent years) had revolved more around the stage-show than the music itself. Nothing is more important to a stage-show than a stage. Music Times went back and checked out the last ten Super Bowl performers and more importantly, what they were playing on, and ranked them accordingly (including Beyoncé, Bruno Mars, Madonna and more). This isn't a ranking of the performances, but of the platform that held it.

  • UK Assigns Tax Relief Options for British Orchestras, Similar to Those Used for Film Industry

    One of the constant struggles facing fans and producers of classical music is how to keep orchestras on their feet. No form of music is more expensive to carry out than orchestral-between the cost of paying for so many musicians and the time needed to train such a large "staff" accordingly-and those costs become more and more worrisome as younger generations have largely lost interest in the form. Ticket prices are rarely enough to keep orchestras afloat so very often they rely on hefty charitable donations. Politicians in the UK may have the right idea however, having introduced legislation to grant orchestras tax reliefs.

  • Seattle vs. New England: Spotify Compares and Contrasts Music Listening in Super Bowl Competitiors' Hometowns

    Music Times made an attempt several weeks ago to predict the winner of the Super Bowl based on quality of albums coming out of the regions represented in the AFC and NFC Championship Games. So far so good: Seattle is facing New England, as we predicted, but will the Seahawks triumph? Who knows? Not Spotify. The music streaming service did use its numbers-tracking technology to create two playlists of songs representing the performers that listeners in the respective regions listen in far greater numbers than their foes on the opposite coast.

  • Max Graef Making U.S. Debut with 10 North American Shows, Including Mexico and Canada Dates [SCHEDULE]

    Berlin underground house music performer Max Graef will be coming to North America for his first appearances in the United States and elsewhere, and fortunately he's doing more than just the handful of gigs in New York and Los Angeles, as many are wont to do in his line of work. He'll kick off the tour during March in Chicago and then play another nine gigs across the continent, including one in Mexico and two in Canada

  • 7 Songs You Didn't Know Jeff Lynne Helped Write: Sam Smith, George Harrison and...The Pussycat Dolls?

    Sam Smith's "Stay With Me" was one of the biggest songs of 2014 and this week's big news was that Tom Petty would receive a songwriting credit for the song due to its similarities to his own "I Won't Back Down," a coincidence that Petty referred to as a "musical accident no more no less." Although Petty has appeared in all of the headlines, an equal amount of the songwriting credit was also awarded to Jeff Lynne, the frontman for the Electric Light Orchestra, who has been behind the scenes on many a track. Check out a list of Lynne's other surprise songwriting credits, not counting work with band's he's a part of, including the Traveling Wilburys.
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