Editorial: Hang the DJ

That this issue of Paste came out on time is something of a minor miracle. Yesterday, while several of the staff were playing catch-up after trips to the opposite ends of the musical spectrum—Max Blau to the Pitchfork Festival and Bonnie Stiernberg to the Calgary Folk Festival (I just went to the beach)—we decided to finally open up a Paste room at Turntable.fm, and got more than a little distracted.

It seems like in a matter of weeks, three more music streaming/discovery/social gatherings have come on strong: Spotify, Rexly and Turntable. I jumped right on the Spotify bandwagon, creating a couple playlists and perusing my friends’ selections. My kids have just become huge Adele fans, and it was great to be able to play them 19 on the drive down to the beach via Spotify’s mobile. I haven’t had a chance to mess around with Rexly yet, but the service promises some good social functions.

Add those to the mix of Rdio, Pandora, Slacker, Jango, Maestro, Grooveshark, Last.fm and Mog, and it starts to feel like search engines in the ’90s.

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But none of them have sucked me so completely as Turntable. It’s the first music-streaming service that makes sharing music fun. It’s social in the sense that while I jumped up and started DJing, random friends stopped by to listen or DJ beside me. There’s a chat room that was busy with music discussion, story-telling and good-natured trash-talking. Themes emerged as we’d go on a soul streak, get electronic or introduce a little twang. Songs got played in honor of listeners’ names and hometowns, and for a while songs from Wes Anderson movies kept popping up. And then there’s the joy of the instant feedback loop—seeing whose avatar’s head starts bobbing at a song you’ve picked. You can visit the Paste room here. The English folk-rock band Slow Club will be debuting songs from its new album at 2 p.m. EST today as guest DJs.

The first music-streaming service I ever tried, though, was Dial-A-Song, an ever-changing series of demos and outtakes that They Might Be Giants recorded to the duo’s answering machine. The quirky, irreverent and sometimes nonsensical songs were unlike anything I’d heard on the radio, and frankly, anything I’ve heard since. When the band released it’s first kids record No!, my then-two-year-old daughter Emma heard the title track and declared, “That’s my song!” I was just glad to have kids’ music that I enjoyed as much (okay, more) than my offspring. The band is back to form with an album for us grown-ups and they grace this week’s cover.

If I can point you to one other don’t-miss feature in this issue, it’s Robert Burke Warren’s review of Paul McCartney’s recent New York show. I’ve never been much of a fan of concert reviews, but Warren offers instead a personal essay on what Macca has meant to him.