Here’s the presentation I gave at the 2019 Pop Conference, where the theme was MUSIC, DEATH AND AFTERLIFE. As soon as that theme was announced, I knew I was going to pitch a paper about the odd history of “Seasons in the Sun,” and how/why Terry Jacks made it a multi-million selling success, when multiple artists before him had recorded remarkably similar versions of the song that went nowhere, commercially. 

By some miracle, I got through the entire talk without crying once.

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My iPod has 31,302 songs. 1,173 of them are rated 5 stars. On a recent cross-country drive, listening to a playlist consisting solely of those 5-star songs, I found myself whiling away the miles trying to decipher what set each one apart from the other 30,129.

So I’ve started a Tumblr to record the results of that ongoing effort. I’m going to try to update it daily, but life being what it is that’s more of a wish than a promise.

I did this as a guest post for Hypebot, shortly after YouTube snatched up BandPage. Having seen the power of Pandora’s AMPcast program firsthand, I was a bit amazed tech reporters weren’t paying more attention to how various services were (or were failing to) provide useful tools to the artists in their catalog. Continue reading →