My home office sometimes looks as if a Category 5 hurricane swept through. There are piles of magazines, teetering towers of books, records and CDs that have so far evaded being filed, and dozens of sticky notes and scraps of paper featuring near-illegible scribbles signifying… something. There are also special folders on three different computers filled with bits cut and pasted from websites, newsletters and social media.
This organization catastrophe is the result of 11 months of reading, researching, surfing, scrolling and otherwise sourcing out material for all my music writing, radio shows, podcasts and whatever other assignments fall in my lap. Whenever I run across something that I think might be useful, I squirrel it away somehow, eventually finding a home for the factoid somewhere in my content factory.
Well, most of these bits of trivia find a home. By the end of November, there’s plenty of material that’s orphaned and unused for any number of reasons. I could simply sweep everything into a big recycling bin, file the books, records, and CDs, and continue to ignore those files on my computers. That seems wrong, though, so each December, I cobble together a special Ongoing History of New Music show called 60 Mind Blowing Facts About Music in 60 Minutes. It is aired on the radio before being converted to a podcast so that the whole world may have their minds blown.
However, even with this inventory clearance, I still haven’t used all my cool factoids for 2024. Fortunately, I have this space every week. Here then are an additional 10 mind-blowing items about music. What you do with this information is up to you.
1. Your headphones are filthy
My inbox is constantly clogged with surveys and polls that are cleverly disguised ads for some company or service. Most come from online casinos looking to drag people back to their sites in hopes of seeing more wagers. British agencies are especially fond of this approach.
A cloud storage company recently sent me the results of a bacterial study that says the average set of headphones is dirtier than a typical toilet seat. On average, 1,073 bacteria colonies were found on an average pair of headphones, compared with 425 on a toilet seat. Laptops are also teaming with microbes, with a bacteria colony count of 645. Phones are surprisingly clean, with an average of 187 colonies. Staphylococcus spp. and Micrococcus spp. were the most common bugs found on tech devices.
I won’t be sharing headphones with anyone anymore.
2. People love Shazam. A lot
In 2002, Shazam started a service for British music fans. If a song came on, you pulled out your dumbphone, dialled a number and then held up your phone so it could “hear” the song you were trying to ID. Once it did, you got a text message with the title and artist. Since then, it’s been turned into a smartphone app, bought by Apple, and adapted for a cheapo primetime TV game show. Earlier this month, it was announced that Shazam has identified 100 billion songs. The app averages about 2.6 billion tags a month and has somewhere around 300 million monthly users.
3. Want to go all medieval on someone? Musically, I mean
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Teenage Engineering is a quirky tech company that makes some interesting tools, gadgets and tools for the music-minded. Just in time for Christmas, it has the EP-1320, a new drum machine/sampler that comes programmed with sounds from medieval times (from 1320–geddit?). That includes lyres, hurdy-gurdies, really old-school drum sounds, and even some Gregorian chants. For US$299, you can basically create your own Game of Thrones soundtrack in your bedroom.
4. The completely unnecessary billionaire rap
One of the advantages of being a billionaire is that you can do whatever you want. One of the disadvantages is that there isn’t anyone to tell you “Stop it! No! Cut it out!” This was the case with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who insisted on releasing a cover of a song called Get Low (discretion advised) with autotune master T-Pain. This wasn’t necessary or welcome. After this came out, some people believed that Lara Trump was owed an apology.
5. This release is even more disgusting
Earlier this year, Green Day had some fun celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Dookie album. In a quirky marketing move, they released songs from the album on obscure and obsolete music storage formats, ranging from an old-fashioned piano roll to an 8-track to a Game Boy cartridge. There’s even a Big Mouth Billy Bass (remember those things?) that will sing Basket Case for you. This greatly annoyed a thrash metal group called Belushi Speed Ball. Over the years, they issued music in similar ways and felt a little ripped off. In response, they released a version of their single This is the Peak on dog poop encased in epoxy. Only one copy was created and it sold on eBay.
6. Lily Allen’s feet
British singer Lily Allen revealed that she makes more money from photos of her feet on OnlyFans than she does with her music. Interested? Only US$10 a month. It was estimated that she’s hauling in US$8,000 a month before taxes.
7. A victory against illegal AI music
HarmonyCloak is a new weapon against unauthorized generative AI models. It works by inserting “imperceptible, error-minimizing noise into compositions.” That noise cannot be heard by the human ear, but AI models do. It confuses the AI, making it “unlearnable.” If the song can’t be learned, then it can’t be replicated or even mimicked. All the AI sees is a “disorganized, unlearnable dataset.” A Star Trek-style cloaking device for music? Yep.
8. Going for surgery? Prep with the right music in the recovery room
Researchers at California Northstate University College of Medicine looked at 3,736 studies, narrowing things down to 35 papers containing data on patient outcomes, focusing on things like pain and anxiety related to surgical procedures. They found that just listening to music after surgery through speakers or headphones has a “noticeable effect” on pain and anxiety levels. Heart rates dropped, as did levels of the stress hormone cortisol. That meant less reliance on powerful painkillers.
9. The opera revival that had patrons running away screaming
A new take on the 1922 opera Sancta Susanna debuted this fall in Stuttgart, Germany. When it first appeared, it was rather scandalous with its exploration between lust and celibacy in the world of Christianity. The new production took things to a new level with naked nuns on roller skates, naked performers appearing as clappers in church bells, live piercings, unsimulated sex acts and “a performer has a piece of their very real flesh cut off and fried on a stove.” Oh, and did I mention the dwarf dressed as the pope spinning around on some robotic contraption?
Although some audience members reacted badly — many left, some got sick, and others required medical attention — all performances were sold out.
10. And finally, this was selected as one of the ’10 most arousing songs’
We’ll end like we started with a survey pushed out by digital PR company Reboot Online. They did some cursory searching through 750 songs to find out which boosted libido the most. At the top of the chart was Hot to Go by Chappel Roan followed by Flo Rida’s Good Feeling and Lady, Touch Yourself by Nikki Idol. The rest of the top 10 was filled with sexy pop songs. The one exception was this track from Canadian rock duo Black Pistol Fire. I was happy to see them on the list, but does this do it for you?
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