December 31, 2009

Stereogum's 50 Most Downloaded MP3s Of 2009

It's the most wonderful time of the year -- i.e., the time to rank and categorize the best and worst music-related content we spent the last 12 months blogging about. Welcome to Listomania.

The purest year-end music list would be a playcount of the tunes you listened to most, and not the carefully sculpted, self-consciously eclectic 1-10s we end up reading. We know you're as sick as we are of parsing critics' picks, so here's at least one countdown where you won't find Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, or Dirty Projectors in the Top 10. That's because the following fifty songs are ranked via the number of times someone clicked and downloaded them from our servers, and nothing else. It's a list that finds Julian Plenti feeling pretty good about himself. Same goes for Rain Machine, Asobi Seksu, Handsome Furs, and our CMJ lineup. Of course, only you can tell us how many times you actually played the tunes after they left our nest.

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Posted at 11:23 AM in Listomania, MP3

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December 29, 2009

The 10 Most NSFW Music Videos Of 2009

It's the most wonderful time of the year -- i.e., the time to rank and categorize the best and worst music-related content we spent the last 12 months blogging about. Welcome to Listomania.

Why all the nudity in 2009? Well, look at this way: The affordability of video production technology has made it easier for everybody to get in the game; the unceremonious death of music television has shifted the means of music video distribution to the internet, where it's less about FCC than about NSFW; and let's face it, blogger hit counts love no four letters more than NSFW. More than ever, video directors and bands are cutting through the iMovie inundation by setting their songs to a bunch of extras parading their giggly bits. (Occasionally the artists themselves are baring more than just their souls, too.) To memorialize the year in NSFW, here are ten of the most prurient sets of moving pixels we've seen all year. Any other week we'd say you shouldn't watch this at your cubicle, but you deserve a reward for even being at work this week, so go nuts! Lots of nuts here.

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December 28, 2009

The 12 Best Late Night TV Performances Of 2009

It's the most wonderful time of the year -- i.e., the time to rank and categorize the best and worst music-related content we spent the last 12 months blogging about. Welcome to Listomania.

It was a tumultuous year for late night laffs, with Jimmy Fallon joining the fray, Conan taking over Tonight only to find awful Leno sink the NBC ship at 10PM, and Letterman enjoying career-high ratings despite (or because of?) a sex scandal. It was, however, a solid year for late night music booking. We regularly saw bands leap from our backyards and comments section to network television, and indexed highlights for you the mornings after. Here's a look back at a dozen memorable late night TV jams in reverse chronological order. It kicks off with last week's surprise in which a Stroke and some ex-SNLers revisited a yuletide classic.

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R.I.P. Vic Chesnutt • As first reported by @KristinHersh, the paralyzed Athens singer/songwriter overdosed on pills and was pronounced dead on Christmas day. Constellation has collected words from admirers like Jeff Mangum and Michael Stipe, along with info on public memorials and donating in his honor.

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December 24, 2009

Stereogum & team9 Present... MySplice 4: 2009 Mashed Up

There could not have been a more apt ID3 than that of Freelance Hellraiser's "Stroke Of Genius," the MP3 that launched this decade's most fitting musical legacy. Parts of two or three or thirty tracks mixed into one supersong? What better than mashups to soundtrack a generation of smartphone-wielding Adderall chompers coming of age in a world where all music is free. In the years since Freelance Hellraiser (and 2 Many DJs, Go Home Productions, DJ Earworm, Party Ben, et al) raised the bar for bastard pop, we've seen bootlegging go mainstream in the hands of Girl Talk and Danger Mouse, not to mention 2004's chart-topping Collision Course and the dozen questionable Jigga x [rock band] torrents in its wake. This year, bands like Passion Pit and Phoenix distributed stems of their hits as blogbaiting publicity stunts. (It worked!) Still, when it comes to remixes, few are more thrilling than hearing the vocals of one song over the instrumental of another and have it absolutely work. Which is why we've again collaborated with our favorite mashup artist, Australian producer Neil Mason aka team9, to mix our favorite tracks of 2009 with familiar oldies, creating something more than the sum of their parts. The process -- Stereogum acquiring exclusive audio and making playlists, Neil working his ACID Pro magic (i.e., the hard part) -- started months ago, with an eye on this holiday deadline. It's our fourth annual Christmas present to you, and we think it's the best MySplice yet. Enjoy...

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Merry Christmas From Thom Yorke • "i guess this time of year is a time for serious reflection and i have been doing a lot of that since coming back from copenhagen. you know what has stunned me coming back is the anger you can taste in the air..." More at DeadAirSpace.

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December 23, 2009

U CAN HAZ MOAR INDIE XMAS • Our yuletide '09 playlist keeps expanding. Yesterday we premiered Crocodiles & Dum Dum Girls' holiday jam. Now we've added Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings' "Ain't No Chimneys" and Magnetic Fields' "Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree" (from Realism). Download 'em here.

jj nº 3 Out In March On Secretly Canadian • Enigmatic Swedish crew jj has signed with SC (in conjunction with Scandinavian home Sincerely Yours) for its followup to the acclaimed jj nº 2. nº 3's out 3/9 stateside, two weeks before jj's first US tour (with the xx, because duh) starts. SXSW warm-up gigs look likely.