Mike

Sort of. 2015 marked the first time in U.S. history that new releases were outsold by catalogue albums. Seems like everyone's been feeling extra nostalgic lately. The term "catalogue" refers to albums released more than 18 months ago. According to Nielsen's annual year end music report, catalogue albums outsold current releases by 4.3 million copies, something never before seen in the industry.Just 10 years ago, current music sales outpaced catalogue music by over 150 million albums. Keep in mind that these stats don't include album streams, but regardless, it's a significant turning point. http://www.chartattack.com/news/2016/01/20/old-music-is-outselling-new-music-for-the-first-time-in-history/

I know . No caddy shack, animal house, stripes. .what the heck?

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/whats-the-most-rewatchable-movie-of-all-time/ Ha, when i saw this I had to laugh. I'll go for Jaws, SW, Shawshank and Gump as the ones I can recite the entire scripts! .

that's so true Ken. the office has been very somber the last few days, most my colleagues are near my age or a bit older, the youngsters come through thinking we're morose about the seahawks, which we are not. It's just football and there's always next season. No, we are saddened yet twice in ten days with the passing of both Bowie and Frey. We are very much an office of music lovers here. We all appreciate how valuable the artists that gave us these great songs are, how hard it is deal with them departimg earth. They have become like close friends or even like family. All these decades listening to the songs and the emotions they evoke in us all.

The Eagles are up there with Allman Bros, and The Doobie Brothers as bands I reveled in during the seventies. Listening to them over and over and over, never tiring of it. Still a music staple.

Santa's flight schedule takes two days and three nights

yeah, well, welcome to the era of "promise a state-of-the-art stadium and you get the team"

St. Louis Rams moving to Los Angeles!! Wow, long time relief for the waiting fans there.

I like what Teddy Roosevelt said.... "Do what you can with what you have where you are".

My first big impression of him came in 1977. While I had heard his songs, and really liked them, I hadn't "seen" him. Funny background. My maternal grandfather played gold with Bing Crosby and worked with him on a number of Catholic causes. My mother even was gifted a personalized signed 8x10 glossy from Bing (in fact it would have been quite valuable had my mothers name not been included on the photo - oh the irony) So you can imagine my parents an I sitting in the livingroom one Christmas in the mid seventies watching a singing star from their generation with one from mine sharing a most beautiful song together. Peace and thanks to you for all the great songs David Robert Jones.

Happy New Year songfactors. Sing, sing a song, sing out loud, sing out strong. Sing of good things not bad, sing.... oh, you get the idea

that's cool ... wow have won only once from a radio station back in 1982. A clarion tape/fm car stereo and tix to April Wine/Uriah Heap.

yeah, great folks here for sure, just not a grand central station type of board, more like a modern day Mayberry. Small, by highly significant in American pop culture!

and Lucy never lets CB kick the football

Do you like the sweet sounds of Billie Holiday or the hard edge of a Metallica song? A new study from the University of Cambridge says your choice shows whether you're an empathetic or systematic thinker. Now that music has gone digital, there must be all sorts of algorithms and marketing studies out there that recording companies and music delivery services use to determine the types of tunes fans are most likely to consume. The songs that you choose to put on your mobile device may say a lot to marketing executives, but they might also say a lot about your brain and personality. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, led by Ph.D. student David Greenberg, may have come up with a way to determine how people think based on their musical preferences, using studies of over 4,000 participants, according to a statement from the university. The psychologists who oversaw the study published a paper of their findings on Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. The study sought out music fans through a Facebook personality test app called myPersonality. They gave each participant a questionnaire that measured certain personality traits using an assessment called the Revised NEO Personality Inventory that looks at personalities along with five traits including neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness, according to the study. Then sometime later, the participants received a second survey about their musical preferences. Each participant rated 15-second song excerpts from 50 different songs that represented 26 different genres and subgenres of music, according to the study. Researchers compared the results from both studies to determine if they exhibited any patterns across the participant pool. The study says that those with a more empathetic nature enjoy genres of music that are more mellow, such as R&B and soft rock, "unpretentious" such as country and folk, and contemporary such as acid jazz and Euro pop. Those with a more "systematic" way of thinking who focus more on structure and rules in their thought patterns enjoy music that's more intense. As the researchers dug a little deeper into the data, they came up with some more interesting findings about people's music preferences. The people from the empathy group also enjoy listening to music that exhibits less energy, more emotional depth and negative emotions such as sadness or depression. The music of the systematic thinkers are almost the opposite. They enjoy songs with more energy, positive emotions and "a high degree of cerebral depth and complexity," according to the statement. Researchers also came up with a short list of popular rock, jazz and classical songs that fall in line with their study's results. The statement says that if you like Norah Jones' "Come Away With Me," Billie Holliday's "All of Me" and Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," you probably have more empathy. If you prefer listening to Antonio Vivaldi's "Concerto in C," The Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" and Metallica's "Enter the Sandman," then you're probably more of a systematic thinker. The researchers who organized the study said these results can not only show music fans what the songs on their iTunes playlists say about them but it could also help recording and music distribution companies find ways to better target their audiences. "A lot of money is put into algorithms to choose what music you may want to listen to, for example on Spotify and Apple Music," David Greenberg, the psychology Ph.D. candidate from the University of Cambridge, said in the statement. "By knowing an individual's thinking style, such services might in the future be able to fine-tune their music recommendations to an individual." The songs on our iPods may not only be able to tell others about how we think but also affect the way we perceive the people around us. A study published in 2009 in the journal Neuroscience Letters found that listening to happy and sad songs could change the way that people read other people's faces. Researchers had participants listen to happy and sad songs and asked them to rate the emotional status of people's faces. The study says that those who listened to happier tunes were more able to identify happy faces and those who listened to sad songs could better pick out people who were feeling more down in the dumps. Unfortunately, neither study could tell us if people who listen to Nickelback were brain-dead. http://www.cnet.com/news/your-musical-taste-denotes-how-your-brain-operates/

Paid streaming music has arrived on Planet Apple, where it was regarded as unworthy for years. Today, the tech giant has entered the streaming music business with its much-anticipated Apple Music subscription service. Like other streaming services, it offers access to tens of millions of tracks for a monthly fee.

If you really want a "twinge" check this out ...

John Williams' soundtrack to Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park still stands as one of the best film scores of all time. With its mix of menace, wonder, and heroism, it's an album that has stood the test of time. Just ask anyone who went to see Jurassic World opening weekend and they’ll tell you that the moment the original theme kicked in they were choking up big time. As if to prove the point, the recent release of Jurassic World has given rise to an interesting happening: it’s brought the theme from Jurassic Park onto the Billboard charts, and it’s number one with a bullet. Business Insider made the announcement today that "Jurassic Park Theme" has taken the top spot on the Classical Digital Songs chart. What’s even more interesting is that the awesome classical cover duo known as The Piano Guys have taken the #2 spot on that same chart, with the very same song. The track comes off of their album, http://www.cinemablend.com/m/new/Jurassic-Park-Just-Achieved-An-Incredible-Milestone-Thanks-Jurassic-World-72134.html

The human ability to create and enjoy music has puzzled the finest minds since Aristotle. Even Charles Darwin was unable to explain how music evolved by natural selection, and he concluded that “music is the greatest mystery”. However, a credible hypothesis to explain how music evolved in human culture has been proposed by Leonid Perlovsky of Harvard University and published online in Frontiers in Psychology on April 10th, 2013. Perlovsky proposes that music helps us to deal with cognitive dissonance, thereby allowing us to navigate a world teeming with contradictions. Cognitive dissonance, much studied in social psychology, refers to situations we all regularly face when we experience conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. These conflicts produce discomfort that we feel compelled to reduce by changing our attitude, belief or behaviour. For example, you enjoy smoking (behaviour) but know it causes lung cancer (cognition); you reduce the discomfort of the consequent cognitive dissonance by falsely telling yourself the chances you will get cancer are infinitesimally small. Cognitive dissonance often causes rejection of new knowledge that contradicts existing beliefs that people don’t want to surrender. For example, some religious people reject the theory of evolution in the face of massive scientific evidence. The discomfiting effects of the resulting cognitive dissonance are reduced by turning to a literal interpretation of the biblical story that God created all the biological species individually several thousand years ago. The development of human culture depended on acquiring new knowledge, much of which contradicted existing knowledge, consequently producing cognitive dissonance. But, since people are naturally prone to ignore new contradictory information in order to ameliorate the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, how did human culture ever develop? Perlovsky proposes that cultural development was enabled by music. For example, when language, the pre-eminent marker of human culture, was emerging, the new words split the previously unified world into more and more distinct pieces, precipitating widespread cognitive dissonance. Music, on the other hand, unifies the world into a whole. The human psyche requires both the analytical fragmentation characteristic of new knowledge and the harmony of unity. Music enables the former by providing the latter. Perlovsky traces how music developed in line with great cultural changes – from the time of King David right up to today. Perlovsky quotes various experiments to demonstrate music’s power to overcome cognitive dissonance, thereby helping us retain contradictory knowledge. For example, a group of four-year-olds were each given five popular toys and asked to rank them in order of preference. The teacher then said she had to leave the room, and while she was out they were not to play with the second-ranked toy. When she returned to the room she found that the children were entirely ignoring their formerly second-ranked toys. When confronted with the dissonance “I like this toy” and “I shouldn’t play with it”, the conflict was resolved by rejecting the initial preference for the toy. But when the teacher turned music on when leaving the room, the second-ranked toy retained its original value when she returned and reinitiated play. The contradictory knowledge didn’t lead the children to simply discard the toy. Music speaks to our emotions. Love and death are huge universal themes in human culture, each steeped in contradictions. We long for spiritual eternity but know that our earthly lives are finite. We long to trust fully, but we know it is dangerous to trust because we can be betrayed or disappointed. It is no coincidence that so many popular songs deal with love and betrayal and that we turn to sad music in times of mourning. When human language started to emerge from crude vocalisations, it divided into two branches, one low and the other high in emotion. The emotional branch evolved into music and the other into ordinary language, each chosen by natural selection. We incorporate emotions into all our decision-making. Music powerfully and uniquely conveys an array of nuanced emotions, helping us to reconcile our conflicted emotions when making choices. Music enhances our cognitive abilities. Cognitive dissonance was a concomitant of human cultural development. We created music, in part, to help us to tolerate and overcome it. http://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/how-music-helps-us-to-navigate-a-world-full-of-conflicts-1.2196978

Jack Ely, lead singer of The Kingsmen, who were best known for 1960s hit Louie Louie, has died at the age of 71. His son Sean Ely said the musician died at home in Redmond, Oregon, after a long battle with an illness. "Because of his religious beliefs, we're not even sure what (the illness) was," he said. Ely's incoherent singing on Louie Louie led the FBI to investigate the famous track on the grounds that it might be obscene. The law enforcement agents concluded, in a lengthy investigative report, that the song was "unintelligible at any speed". Ely had a falling out with the band shortly after the song was recorded and later trained horses in Oregon. Louie Louie was originally recorded in 1957 by Richard Berry, who had written it two years earlier. The song is written from the perspective of a man who wants to sail to Jamaica to return to a girl he loves. But it was Mr Ely's rendition that popularised the song. His son said: "Right out of his mouth, my father would say, 'We were initially just going to record the song as an instrumental, and at the last minute I decided I'd sing it. It's all of this is in a 10-by-10 room with one microphone. I'm standing on my tippy toes yelling into the microphone: Louie Louie! Louie Louie! We gotta go!'" The sound engineer working on the track raised the studio microphone to several feet above Ely's head and placed him in the middle of a group of musicians to create a better "live feel" for the recording. The result was that Ely - who was 20 at the time - had to shout as loudly as he could to be heard over the drums and guitar. It might not have helped, either, that Ely was wearing braces at the time, although he maintained that the main problem was trying to sing with his head tilted back at a 45-degree angle. The song has been widely recognised by organisations including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Grammy Hall of Fame for its influence on the history of rock and roll. Ely co-founded The Kingsmen in 1959. The band primarily recorded cover versions of songs. Four years later, the group recorded Louie Louie. The Kingsmen had a couple of other minor hits, Money and The Jolly Green Giant. However, Ely was content with his legacy as a one-hit wonder, according to his son. "He wanted to try on different occasions to pursue other endeavours in the music industry, but I think when it was all done and said he was pretty happy that he did Louie Louie." http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32507885

Watch Kiss Meet Scooby-Doo in New Film 'Rock and Roll Mystery' Scooby-Doo! And Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery is an upcoming summer full-length film that sees the Kiss gang get animated and call up Scooby-Doo, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Fred of Mystery Inc. to solve the mystery of the Crimson Witch. The witch is disrupting a Halloween concert at the amusement KISS World and is setting out to destroy the planet by summoning the Destroyer. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/watch-kiss-meet-scooby-doo-in-new-film-rock-and-roll-mystery-20150421

couldn't log in on my phone with email, but, used my username (mike) and password. ..voila, I'm in. try that.

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/live-cynthia-lennon-first-wife-8964504 75-year-old passed away in Majorca after short battle with cancer.