Outside Lands Festival 2015: Band of the Day picks

Less than one week to go until we’re grooving in the groves at San Francisco’s Outside Lands Fest! To help you navigate the lineup, I’ve put together a list of all of the bands that were ever featured in Band of the Day app, and playlists for each day.

FRIDAY 8/7 (click here to listen to the Spotify playlist)

Amon Tobin - A legendary electronic music pioneer explores otherworldly sounds and melodies

Iration - Spreading feel-good waves of reggae infused with sunny rays of pop and rock

Alvvays - Starlit indie pop that glitters like sea glass, from a Canadian group inspired by jangly Britpop

The Family Crest - Communal creators of audacious Baroque/orchestral pop

The Revivalists - Zealous roots rock spirited by the funky essence of New Orleans

SATURDAY 8/8 (click here to listen to the Spotify playlist)

Tame Impala - Arena-ready rock steeped in 1960s psychedelia and tied together with a tight pop sensibility

Milky Chance - Elegant electronic production with acoustic guitars and lilting, lush vocals

Angus & Julia Stone - Gruffly majestic country-folk

Classixx - Coastal summer anthems with impossibly sunny dance grooves

UMO - Gloriously psychedelic lo-fi funk over warped hip hop beats

Misterwives -Join a trio of New Yorkers on a vivacious excursion through turnpikes of soul, dance, and pop

Langhorne Slim - Rollicking folk-rock gems from a true American troubadour

Twin Peaks - Nods to godfathers of guitar-guided pop, but fueled by gallons of garage rock

Fantastic Negrito - Channeling his Blues forefathers to tell the story of a life rebuilt after destruction

SUNDAY 8/9 (click here to listen to the Spotify playlist)

Slightly Stoopid - Catch a whiff of feel-good vibes from one of the defining bands of California's reggae/rock scene

Hot Chip - The U.K.'s brainiest dance group injects some joyful house into their quirky electro-pop sound

The Devil Makes Three - Raw and raucous trio inspired by both old n’ new timey barn-burners

ODESZA - An electronic wonderland of glitched-out vocals and visceral pop hooks

James Bay - Stark, elegant acoustic strumming powerfully delivered by a 22 year-old singer-songwriter

Allah-Las - Californian surf rock for bumming around in a 60s-style beach bungalow

Shakey Graves - Powerful and mesmerizing lo-fi folk/blues from a true Texas gentleman

Givers - Louisiana's jubilant musical altruists combine indie pop with Afro-beats

Kidnap Kid - Expressive, emotionally-charged house music from one of the UK's rising producers

The 10 Best Apps For Music Discovery

Great to see Band of the Day app listed in the #2 spot (just behind Soundcloud)!

Tweeted from the bottom now I'm here

 4 years ago today, I sent a tweet that would become the defining point of my career.

But before I get to that story, I need to give you some context. It was early 2011, and I was an unemployed 24 year old living in my mom's house in Santa Clara, California. This was the house I had lived in throughout most of my high school years, and the room hadn't changed one bit since then -- the walls were still painted a splotchy shade of turquoise, decorated with set lists peeled off of the stages of San Francisco's concert venues and signed by obscure indie bands.

I had just moved back after spending a year and a half in London, where I did an MA degree in International Broadcast Journalism at Westminster University. After the initial excitement of catching up with family, friends, and getting thoroughly reacquainted with proper Mexican food, the dreaded quarter-life crisis came in like a wrecking ball. My student loan money was nearly all spent, and I had no job prospects.

At this point, a typical day was something like:

10am: Eat a bowl of cereal while transfixed by games of Plinko on "The Price Is Right."

Afternoon: Halfheartedly scour job sites, anticipating rejection before even writing a cover letter because the job market was so grim.

Evening: Crap, dinner time already? Guess it's time to get out of pajamas and take a shower...

Late night: Distract myself from thoughts of, "what's wrong with you? Why haven't you found a job yet? You had a stable job before, why did you have to give it up for London? Look at you now, you unemployed slacker!" by reading books, watching TV shows/movies, and browsing the internet until passing out.

So yeah...it wasn't one of the happiest periods in my life. Luckily, the power of Craigslist and my mom's instinct joined forces to get me out of this funk. She was also unemployed at the time and, while on her own search for work, came across a Craigslist posting that she thought I should take a look at. It was at a small startup in Mountain View, and they were looking for a summer music writing intern. Because I had been doing music journalism since I was 18, she thought it would be right up my alley.

Initially, I dismissed the posting because I thought that with a Master's degree, I deserved a job way beyond internship level. Besides, it wasn't supposed to start until summer and it was only early February. What would I do until then, even if I applied and managed to get the internship? But after taking the time to thoroughly read through the posting, everything that was written in it resonated with me. I remember feeling physically tingly with excitement while reading the tasks this internship would require. At this point, I decided it was worth it to dig a little deeper and to find out everything I could about this company, 955 Dreams. Mostly to make sure it wasn't really a phone sex hotline ("for a good time, dial 955-DREAMS").

In actuality, they had just built this cool iPad app called The History of Jazz, which was an interactive timeline of jazz history.

In my research, I found the company's Twitter handle and saw that they only had a couple hundred followers. At this point in my job hunt, I was so jaded that I just had a "meh...I kinda don't give a shit about anything right now" attitude. So instead of just sending a cover letter and resume like any sane person would do, I impulsively decided to tweet at them, "You can take down your internship posting now. www.linkedin.com/in/amandavanwest." To my surprise, just a couple of minutes later I received the following DM:

First tweet

The next thing I knew, I was invited to their History of Jazz launch party, where I had to meet all of the founders and their closest friends, family members, and professional acquaintances before going through the formal interview process. Luckily my decision to stick to a two drink maximum (while encouraging other party-goers to imbibe more...) meant that I made it through the party without embarrassing myself, and I was invited in the following Monday for the interview. I was given an assignment to pick an up-and-coming band and write a short review on their music, so I wrote this review of The Vaccines self-titled EP. 

Shortly after, I was given an official offer and I became the company's first hire.

Welcome to the family

Four years later, I'm now the most senior woman in the company, singlehandedly running our music discovery app Band of the Day. I'd like to think that my geeky inner 17 year-old Strokes/indie band fangirl would be proud if she could see me now.

It's been an incredible learning experience, peppered with a heavy hand of surreal moments like judging a Battle of the Bands competition in the Bahamas, speaking on a music tech panel in Spain, and putting on a showcase during SXSW that resulted in tens of thousands of people wanting to get in.

Needless to say, I'm excited to see what this next year at Applauze (a necessary name change!) will have in store. Like any other tech startup, we've gone through our fair share of ups and downs, but I think our strength lies in how we've used the downs as learning experiences, and so that's how we've managed to prevail.

I'm not sure if anyone besides my mom and the spambots reads this blog, but if you've somehow stumbled over here, feel free to leave a comment. Or, y'know, just tweet me.

The Obligatory "Amanda's Top 14 Tracks of 2014" Playlist

It's nearly the end of December, which means my inbox is starting to explode with lots of "so what were your favorite albums of the year?" messages from friends and colleagues. So far I've ignored all of these messages (sorry, pals!) because my mind completely goes blank when I'm asked that question. Why? Because my music ADD is at an all-time high, and I actually rarely listen to full albums.

This is mostly due to the fact that I've been the sole curator of Band of the Day app for the past couple of years, which requires listening to an obscene amount of music in order to effectively choose the best bands to feature. To put it into perspective, that's over 1000 bands I've had to choose, which is drilled down from at least 5-10 times that amount of music listening! But hey, if "I have to listen to TOO much new music" is the worst part of the job, it's not a bad one to be in ;)

Right, back to the matter at hand - my personal list of stand-out tracks released in 2014. I'm too indecisive to rank them, so I've taken the lazy way out by posting them in alphabetical order. Hope you discover some gems from this list, and I'd love to hear feedback on what your favorites were (the YouTube playlist up there has every track).

1. Benjamin Booker, "Violent Shiver" - This is a song that had me going, "Whoa. Who IS this guy?" the first time I heard it. Bluesy, gritty, with just a hint of punk.

2. Dillon Francis feat. DJ Snake, "Get Low" - Oh hey, you didn't realize I also like mainstream music? It's dirty, ridiculous, and any song that causes such a mass dance floor frenzy every single time is a-OK in my book.

3. Fink, "Looking Too Closely" - Gorgeous vocals, heartbreaking melody, utterly captivating.

4. Hamilton Leithauser, "Alexandra" - Dude from The Walkmen. He's still got it!

5. Johnny Stimson, "So.Good." - For a panty-dropping good time, call Johnny Stimson.

6. Kishi Bashi, "Philosphize It! Chemicalize With It!" - I wish I wasn't scared of trying 'shrooms. Because otherwise I'd eat a whole bunch, listen to this song, and run around a psychedelic forest wonderland.

7. Michael Jackson, "Love Never Felt So Good" - there's a 1 in 7 chance that if your song title has the words 'so' and 'good' in it, it'll make my playlist (see: number 5).

8. Milky Chance, "Stolen Dance" - I can't read their band name without thinking of the scene in This Is England when Milky gets beaten up ("Wake up, Milky! Milky, wake up!" cries the little kid). But I digress. Again. Anyway, it's a song that's gotten a ton of airplay this year, but one that I'm always happy to hear and never skip over.

9. ODESZA, "Say My Name (feat. Zyra)" - ODESZA is the perfect intersection between glitchy electronic pop and indie pop, and Zyra's vocals are hypnotic as she sings, "I wanna dance, I wanna dance, I wanna dance with you/So take a chance, take a chance"

10. Porter Robinson, "Sad Machine" - I still get chills from the opening melody of this song. Stunning!

11. Rich Aucoin, "Are You Experiencing?" - Hands down, one of my favorite live acts EVER (please watch the video to see what I mean!). And this song is pretty much the epitome of sonic serotonin: uplifting, makes you feel alive. <3 <3 <3

12. Terror Pigeon, "Girl!" - Another one of those 'makes you feel so alive' tracks. Starts out a little slow, but then builds up into an explosion of awesomeness. I can only imagine how much fun they must be in concert, and I'm hoping to catch them in 2015!

13. White Arrows, "We Can't Ever Die" - One time a dude hit on me by asking, "do you #YOLO?" I wanted to say, "No sir, because that's not grammatically correct!" But I didn't. And now I'm guessing by the title of this song that White Arrows also don't YOLO. #TeamImmortality #FTW

14. Yellerkin, "Solar Laws" - Love at first listen. Seriously, how could you not fall in love with those melodies and vocals?

2014 Music Trend Report: Are males downplaying their love of female-fronted bands?

This was first posted for Band of the Day app on 9/30/14 over at: http://bit.ly/mvsfbands

It’s hard to believe we’re about to begin the tenth month of the year — that’s nearly 300 new bands we’ve featured just in this year alone! Fueled by one too many cups of coffee, and sheer curiosity/music geekery, we decided to take a look at the data of all of the bands we’ve featured in the app this year to see if we could determine any trends on what types of bands are defining the 2014 emerging music scene. We looked at three key data points from the app (number of song plays, number of social media shares, and number of buy button taps), to find the top ten bands in each category. Here are the results (click on the band names to listen to their music):

Most Song Plays

1. The OK Social Club
2. The Fratellis
3. Quiet Company
4. Drowners
5. Megan Bonnell
6. Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas
7. Kayleigh Goldsworthy
8. Deaf Havana
9. Lily & Madeleine
10. Sumie

Most Music Buys

1. The OK Social Club
2. Megan Bonnell
3. Lily & Madeline
4. Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas
5. Kayleigh Goldsworthy
6. The Fratellis
7. Takenobu
8. Quiet Company
9. Western Lows
10. Sumie

Most Social Media Shares

1. The OK Social Club
2. Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas
3. Quiet Company
4. Cherri Fosphate
5. The Fratellis
6. The Sounds
7. Drowners
8. XXANAXX
9. Basecamp
10. Chicks Who Love Guns

Breaking it down by category, we noticed a few trends that popped up. Just based on song plays alone, female singer-songwriters are dominating the results, followed closely behind by British guitar-heavy rock bands. The ladies are also dominating the Most Music Buys category, followed by rock and folk bands. We theorized that the results for Most Social Media Shares would also follow a similar pattern but, after looking at the data, we noticed that it was actually completely different. Rock bands are most likely to be shared publicly on user’s social media networks, followed by electronic and folk bands.

So how can this variance possibly be explained? Digging one layer deeper, we know that 61% of our Band of the Day users are male, while 39% are female. Given this statistic, could this mean that, while the majority of users (both genders) spend more time listening to female singer-songwriters, males are less inclined to publicly share their love of female singer-songwriters, opting to publicly portray a more “masculine” taste in music with heavier guitar rock? While we can’t conclude definitively, and just have a small sampling of the 2014 emerging music landscape, the numbers seem to suggest that this might be the case. Have a different theory on why this might be? Feel free to share your insights by leaving a comment at facebook.com/bandoftheday or tweeting @bandoftheday. </endmusicgeekmode>.

Celebrating 3 years of running Band of the Day app

(Originally published in Band of the Day app on 9/11/14) Three years. One thousand and ninety-seven bands. Back in late summer of 2011, in the heart of Silicon Valley, we — a tiny group of designers, developers, and music writers — weren’t sure if we’d ever hit this milestone. In an industry that’s increasingly automated, how would an app that runs 100% on human curation even survive? What would happen if people didn’t like our taste in music? Luckily for us, there has yet to be a music discovery service that can entirely replace the human touch, and from all the feedback we’ve received, you’ve appreciated our taste in music thus far. Today, as your virtual music geek friend (Amanda Van West - hi!) behind Band of the Day app’s sleekly-designed facade, I’m proud to have chosen Sydney, Australia’s The Vines as the band to celebrate our third birthday.

Many of you might already be well-familiar with The Vines. After all, their debut album Highly Evolved (2002) sold over 1.5 million albums worldwide, with singles like “Get Free” and “Outtathaway!” topping the charts and getting significant airplay. This was followed by 2004’s Winning Days, and had the band touring all over the world. One of those stops was in April 2004 at The Warfield in San Francisco, California. It was part of what was dubbed ‘The Aussie Invasion Tour,’ with The Living End and Jet rounding off the lineup. I was a senior in high school at the time and — after reading all the praise about The Vines in music magazines like NME, Rolling Stone, and Spin — my friends and I made the trek from the suburbs to the big city to finally see what all the hype was about.

As soon as they hit the stage and struck the first few notes, I was in awe of the wild and raw punk rock energy sparking through the air. Frontman Craig Nicholls’ face would distort as he’d snarl out self-loathing lyrics like, “She never loved me/why should anyone?” (‘Get Free’), with beads of sweat flying off of his shaggy ‘do. To put it briefly, it was a ferocious, electrifying performance. Anyone who was there that night wouldn’t have been surprised to see The Vines blow up even further.

But like many bands who experience a meteoric rise to fame, it’s not without consequence. After 2006’s Vision Valley, which didn’t achieve as much commercial success as the previous releases, the band was dropped from their record label. Still, they persisted and two years later released Melodia, the first album for their then-label Ivy League Records. This was followed by 2011’s Future Primitives, which was self-funded by the band. Both were solid releases, but still didn’t achieve the accolades of their first two albums.

Now in September 2014, The Vines are back with a two-disc album, Wicked Nature — arguably their finest album since 2002’s Highly Evolved. It’s been released completely independently, funded through a crowdsourced PledgeMusic campaign (http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/thevines). This album sees a new band lineup, with the rhythm section now made up of Tim John on bass and Lachy West on drums. Nicholls is still at the helm as lead vocalist and guitarist, but for the first time ever he’s also taken on the role of producer (with Paul Mckercher as co-producer for disc one). The result is a 22-song journey through everything from explosive punk rock (“Out The Loop”), to sludgy grunge (“Metal Zone”), to free-spirited psychedelia (“Truth”). It’s The Vines being true to their very core, a band that knows what they do best and have done it with fearless gusto. This is the type of album that we’ll be shamelessly blasting over and over again here at Band of the Day HQ, and we hope that no matter where you are in the world, you’ll take the time to crank it up and join the virtual party on our third birthday today.

And to all of the bands we’ve featured over the past three years, the labels we’ve worked with, the music publicists, the friends/family members/app users who have all said, “hey, have you heard about this band?”, I’d like to extend a huge THANK YOU on behalf of the Band of the Day family. Our app would be nothing without all of this incredible music, and we feel lucky every single day we get to share new tunes with the world. Here’s to making it three years, and for many more years to come! - Amanda Van West (@amandabomb)

Made it to band #1000 on Band of the Day app!

Note: this was first published in Band of the Day app on June 6, 2014

It’s hard to believe that today we’re featuring our 1000th Band of the Day. Instead of exposing you to an unknown band today, we’ve decided to mark this special occasion by taking it back to one of the bands responsible for sparking our own obsession with music discovery: The Strokes. Thirteen years ago, the five New Yorkers -- Julian Casablancas (lead vocals), Nick Valensi (guitar, vocals), Albert Hammond, Jr. (guitar, vocals), Nikolai Fraiture (bass), and Fabrizio Moretti (drums) -- released their debut album Is This It (2001). Almost immediately it received critical acclaim across mainstream and independent music publications, being cited as one of the greatest rock albums of the 2000s and selling millions of copies worldwide. Since then, the band has kept the momentum going with the release of four additional albums: Room On Fire (2003), First Impressions of Earth (2006), Angles (2011), and most recently 2013’s Comedown Machine.

But going back to the Is This It era, it was a time when smartphones and music discovery apps didn’t exist. Most of us discovered new bands the old-fashioned way: radio, television, music magazines, snarky record store clerks...or in my case, snooping through my older brother’s Winamp files on our family’s shared computer. Instead of finding some type of incriminating evidence against him, I double-clicked a song at random, and turned the speakers up. The song was “Hard To Explain” (from Is This It), and I remember this visceral, overwhelming sensation of feeling completely captivated by the music. It sounded nothing like the top 40 radio hits and MTV chart-toppers I normally listened to as a teenage girl coming of age in the early 2000s. Immediately I queued up the rest of the songs on the album, and listened on repeat until I was kicked off the computer.

Needless to say, it didn’t take long for The Strokes to oust 'N Sync as my new favorite band -- lead singer Julian Casablancas was now the top JC in my life (sorry JC Chasez). I bought every magazine with The Strokes on the cover, joined their online forum to meet like-minded fans, and went to all of their concerts when they came through town. One of the most important effects of this teenage devotion was that their music opened up an entirely different world of music to what I had always known. I learned about iconic bands who The Strokes cited as influences, like the Velvet Underground, Television, and New York Dolls; and their contemporaries, like The White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Libertines, and Interpol. Music discovery became an essential part of life, a part that I’m now honored to share with all of you on a daily basis.

So today, instead of exposing your ears to the next best unknown band, I hope you enjoy taking a journey through the musical history of The Strokes with our selection of featured songs from each of their five albums. - Amanda Van West (@amandabomb)