The Appreciation Engine Blog

Posted on July 17, 2012 by

Cloudy With a Chance of Discovery

For the past 7 years, I have made music in the clouds/streaming subscription music services a personal mission. Early on, I was an “early adopter” to Rhapsody, a Real Networks company. Over the years, I’ve had the distinct pleasure to try them all (Rdio, Spotify, Deezer, GrooveShark, MOG, Rhapsody, Napster). Through this affinity and trial, I quickly discerned that this is the way of the future! Exhausting the fan with numerous hurdles to just hear music is futile and I’m super excited that the major labels have woken up to this world of frictionless music discovery and consumption.…

Posted on May 31, 2012 by

Who the hell are The Nerves?

I thought I knew all of the great forgotten bands: The Replacements, with their great songs, unpredictable live shows and self-destructive attitude; Big Star, with their perfect tunes at exactly the wrong time; Nick Drake, with his refusal to tour and corresponding failure to sell records, despite their melancholy brilliance. But somehow amongst all of these lost gems I managed to miss The Nerves.

It was Rdio that finally brought them to my attention. A colleague found them through an Rdio playlist resulting in The Nerves’ compilation album One Way Ticket appearing in my Recent Activity feed – a good illustration of the power of streaming media.…

Posted on April 25, 2012 by

Find the Music We Love

It’s pretty exciting ’round here getting ready for our launch in 2 weeks – crikey! So this is a quick post to show where you can listen to the music we (Kevin, Mike, Jeff & Annabel) love.

Grooveshark
You can find us over with the good folks at Grooveshark. We’ve got a TasteMaker’s Best of 2011 playlist up. And you can check out our monthly playlists – see April’s Revisits (oldies but goodies) and there’s, of course, April’s Hot List (fresh tracks).

Rdio
If you’re an Rdio kind of kid we’ve got all those goodies on there too: The Best of 2011 – Hot List April 2012 – Revisits April 2012