Metrobyte - music sites

Hey, welcome back to MetroByte. My next guest has been literally Donning a wetsuit and surfing around to find the best music websites on the internet. I couldn't believe it when I saw that earlier. Courtney Pulitzer is the publisher of The Cyber Scene, a weekly newsletter covering people behind internet technology. She's here to tell us what she's found, but before we get started, we have someone on the line who thinks they know the answer to tonight's Metro Megabyte giveaway question. Hello.

Hi.

Hi, how are you?

I'm great, how are you?

Great. And this is Margaret from Valley Stream. Margaret, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks.

All right, now you know how our game is played.

Yes.

We need to know what does What does the acronym MIDI stand for?

Okay, I believe it's Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

That is correct! Wow! Score! Margaret, congratulations!

Thank you.

You win the Rio— the Diamond Rio MP3 player. Man, I tell you, I had that thing in my hand earlier and I, you know, I was always hoping you didn't win because frankly—

Yeah, well—

I wanted to take it with me, but—

Well, I'll share it with you.

Oh, thanks! That's so nice. The people these days are so nice in the metro area. Margaret, thanks for watching the show and have fun with that player.

Thank you, I will.

Congratulations.

Thanks a lot.

I tell you, Metro Rocks Week, it really rocks.

It does.

Take care. So Courtney, you've been checking out music sites.

I have. We've been looking at lots of good ones, and I started off with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, and you can see they've got a nice little picture of their facility, some stuff about Elvis, and they have some links to to inductees. They have a calendar of events. You can sign up and get registered so you can get more information from them.

And actually, the induction ceremonies are coming up very soon, so the site's very, very heavily trafficked.

Yes, right.

But this is a very cool site to go if people are interested in knowing who the nominees are, what's coming up next.

Right.

I know VH1 is doing a big special on this, so this is the place to get a lot of information.

Exactly. And you can also hear little music clips from some of the artists who are in the Hall of Fame and who are well, once they get inducted.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah.

And so now we've got another one that I thought was sort of interesting. If we go to the home page here, it's this man who gives music lessons online.

Ah, very cool.

And you can do sort of a correspondence course.

Now what, what site is this? This is called, uh—

This is called Vision Music.

Vision Music. Here we are.

.com.

Right. Visionmusic.com. And you can download lesson plans. Um, he's got Lesson Central here where you can learn chords and things like that. And for instance, um, I was checking out this one, uh, with blues.

Uh-huh.

And you'll see that, um, there's going to be a graphic that downloads here where you see the actual sheet music, and then you'll start hearing what the music is going to sound like.

Beth, now this is an interesting comparison to what we just did in the last segment. Mm-hmm. Because we were doing this, uh, on— in the keyboard lessons.

Right.

The computer software. Here you can do it right on the web. Very cool, because the sheet music looks exactly like sheet music. So it's terrific.

Yeah, it's really a great tool, especially if you don't mind that kind of correspondence course.

Right, right.

And sort of following right along with that, I went to—

Now wait, before you go on, is that free, or do you actually have to pay for the lessons?

There are some that are free and then some that you pay for.

Okay.

They all sort of offer different levels of, you know, lessons that you can learn and chords and things like that.

That's great. And this is another sheet music online site?

Exactly. This one has lots of sheet music that you can purchase.

And this is, uh, sheetmusicone.com.

Right.

You know what, let's not spend too much time on sheet music. These are, these are two sites you can get sheet music.

Right.

But I know the audience, since it's Metro Rocks Week, wants to see famous rockers' websites.

Yeah.

You were looking at some of those, I remember.

There's some really great ones. The first one that's really good is if you go to, um, davidbowie.com. Now this is one of the first musicians who put their own website up, and I know the producer who did it actually There's lots of great stuff. In fact, you can even sign up for David Bowie's ISP as your own online access provider. BowieNet. It's great. It's totally awesome.

He's a forward thinker.

And then, you know, on International Women's Day, I thought I'd throw out Reba McEntire's website.

That's great. Courtney, thanks a lot. There's so much here. It's great to have you on the show as always. If you missed any info about MP3 music education software or hot music websites, don't worry. It's on our website at www.mstmetro.com. Thanks for watching. Send us email. Good night.