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For many of people including myself, there isn’t much time left until the festival is up and away!
I’ve heard many mixed views about how this year’s Leeds/Reading festival will turn out. Personally, I can’t wait for it. I know it’s tough competing with last years line up as it had some of the best metal bands on the planet, such as rock gods Metallica and Rage Against The Machine head lining, along with many other brilliant live acts.

This year on the other hand has rock legends, Faith No More headlining the NME/Radio 1 stage. Also, the amazing Radiohead headlining the main stage. That’s not it, there is a much better selection of bands to suite every taste this year!

Throughout the weekend there’s a wide range of music such as uber dance group, The Prodigy, who will be supporting the Arctic Monkeys on the main stage, Deadmau5 headlining the dance stage, Deftones right along side Fall Out Boy and FFAF plus many more massive names; Kings of Leon and the Lostprophets!

I’m sure most people will agree it is going to be a time to remember for many years to come. I hope all of you attending either Reading or Leeds have an awesome weekend and enjoy all the bands you are wishing to see! =D

Written by Tom B

How is it that in this day and age Maxim can assign a star rating to it–without actually listening the album?

The review of Warpaint–the new album by The Black Crowes in the March issue of Maxim. The writer who has not listened to the album since advance CDs were not made available wrote what appears to be an offensive assessment anyway, quoting “it hasn’t left Chris Robinson and the gang much room for growth.”

The magazine gave the album a two and a half star rating although the writer nor the editor could have heard more than one song (the single “Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution”).

When questioned for an explanation, the magazine described the review as “an educated guess preview.” which is pretty poor.

Black Crowes manager Pete Angelus said, “Maxim’s actions seem to completely lack journalistic integrity and intentionally mislead their readership. When confronted with the fact that they never heard the album they are claiming to ‘review’ in their music section–with a star rating, no less–they attempt to explain that it was an ‘educated guess.’ In an email correspondence, Maxim went on to state: ‘Of course, we always prefer to (sic) hearing music, but sometimes there are big albums that we don’t want to ignore that aren’t available to hear, which is what happened with the Crowes. It’s either an educated guess preview or no coverage at all, so in this case we chose the former.’”

Angelus also stated, “It speaks directly to the lack of the publication’s credibility. In my opinion, it’s a disgrace to the arts, journalism, critics, the publication itself and the public. What’s next–Maxim’s concert reviews of shows they never attended, book reviews of books never read and film reviews of films never seen?”

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Maxim’s Mystical Gypsy Album-Reviewer Loathes The Black Crowes

BLACK CROWES | Maxim Magazine Busted For Reviewing & Rating “Warpaint” Without Ever Hearing It

Maxim Editor Admits Writer Who Reviewed New Black Crowes Disc Never Actually Listened To It

The internet is an absolute goldmine for discovering and listening to new music. there is much more beyond downloading mp3 files using bit torrent or shareaza. What’s more – its all legal. so here is our up the the minute breakdown of the best ways and places to get all the legal free music you need .

Internet Radio:

Internet radio has been around almost as long as the internet itself. Our favourite player for listening to internet radio is winamp, which also comes with a comprehensive internet radio directory so you can immediately start discovering new music from the huge range of niche stations. another great internet radio resource is Live 365.

Last.fm

A recent addition to the free online music world is Last.fm. after installing their special software you can enjoy your own customised internet radio stations. i hesitate to call it radio as their is no commentator or anything, its really just streaming music. The great thing is that you put in the band or artist you want to listen to and Last.fm will serve it up alongside a load of music that it classes as similar. This is an awesome way to discover new music which you are very likely to enjoy.

The downside of Last.fm is that it can sometimes be a bit patchy, and if you start typing in less well known artists or bands, the selection can sometimes be repetitive or completely unrelated. The reason for this is that Last.fm is built around a system called audioscrobbler which monitors the music that you listen to and creates relationships. so if you listen to The doors and then follow that with some jimi Hendrix, then Last.fm will link these two artists together and if someone else asks for jimi Hendrix, they are likely to be served up a side order of The Doors. (this is possibly an oversimplification, click here for the full power geek version.)

Last.fm was recently sold to CBS for $280 million, so its evidently a powerful platform that is here to stay.

Pandora

Pandora is another very powerful system which serves up customised internet radio. The system is entirely browser based, which is nice as it means you don’t have to install any software to enjoy it. Pandora is arguably more reliable when it comes to serving up related music to the artist or band that you specify. The reason for this is that instead of tracking peoples listening habits, the relations are worked out with an algorithm to determine similarity. click here for the full technical details, but suffice to say it works very well. The only drawback with this system is that it takes time and resources to work out all those relations for all that music, so you may find that Pandora is not able to serve up more esoterical or obscure music. However the stuff it does have is plentiful.

Music Blogs

If you are prepared to be a bit more proactive then the world of mp3 blogs can be a very rewarding place for the online music lover. mp3 Blogs are blogs (just like this one) that also serve up mp3s, usually accompanied with a bit of info and some nice pictures… imagine reading NME, but being able to hear the music that the journo is waxing lyrical about. fun

To best enjoy the world of mp3 blogs we recommend using this new firefox based web browser called songbird. This browser will automatically scan a blog for mp3s and set up a playlist for you to listen to the tracks quickly and easily. It really makes the whole mp3 blog browsing experience very easy and fun.

To find what you are looking for the easiest way to get started is to use an mp3 blog search engine. The most popular of these is Elbows. another great one to check out is Hype Machine. once you have found an mp3 blog that you like, you can start to traverse the mp3 blogosphere by following the links you find in that blog.

Conclusion
There is so much free music out there that its hard to comprehend. We will keep our eyes on the scene and update this story as we discover more great sites. If you know of any particularly good ones that we should try, please post them in the comments.