Innovative way to socialize about music

The two most frequent questions I was asked while attending a social gathering in college were: "So what kind of music do you listen to?" and "What was your name again?" in that order. Depending on your response to the first question, the second one may not even be asked.

My most common response was "Pat Benatar" and "John Mayer," which rarely garnered me a second question. Yes this is because I had the unfortunate experience of attending a college filled with "music kids." Mostly I couldn't relate anything to them because I did not share musical aspirations nor did I want the pleasure of paying $5 cover after $5 cover to attend shitty shows.

If thesixtyone.com had been around back then, I presume that things would have been much different.

One part pretentious music kid, two parts digg.com, thesixtyone.com is a social music Web site allowing undiscovered artists to upload their songs for people to hear. After creating a free profile on the site, users then listen to said music and give it a "bump" if they like it. Songs with the most bumps hit a front page of sorts, which consists of other popular tracks.

The site also goes further than a social news site by mimicking the elitist* behavior of discovering new bands. You start out with 99 points which can be subtracted or added depending on your actions. Bumping a new artist costs 33 points, but listening to new artists also gains you points. If and of these artists gain in popularity you get points for that too.

When surfing this site I feel like I've finally found a sufficient way to socialize about the concept of music. I loath most conversation because it just seems so inadequate considering the medium. Perhaps if reality were a musical I'd change my tune.

Yes, I know that wasn't funny.

-TechGonZO

*I'm a huge comic book geek so no matter what you think I'm a bigger elitist.

Singing boring headlines

Remember when radio stations would splice together a word from several different songs to make one singing sentence? Some bored soul, with much more time on his hands than I, created a Web site that will magically translate text into song.

Provided you visit the site, type in "Baby, I love to rock so much it hurts with a good feeling inside" and press play. I basically chose words based on how often they would appear in popular song lyrics.

Rather than decipher each song title and artist in the sentence, I started plugging in bland headlines from major newspapers. (Surprisingly, I detected nothing from either U2 or Bono's voice while doing this.)

And without further ado, I give you the musically enhanced version of New York Times online:

Education:
"When Science Suddenly Mattered, In Space and In Class"
(Read the article here)

World News:
"The Rest of the World Discovers the Business Jet"
(Read the article here)

Business:
"Flying for the Holidays? Brace Yourself" (Read the article here)

Health:
"Keeping Up With the Pack" (Read the article here)

Sports:
"Growing Pains Give the Mets discomfort" (Read the article here)

Op-Ed:
"The Problem Here and the Problem There" (Read the article here)

Entertainment:
"Following His Trail to Danger and Joy" (Read the article here)