Posts filed under 'DJ Wesley Personal'
My “Butterflies” remix hits iTunes!
As many of you know, I recently completed my first commercial remix project, which was done for Worldwide Groove Corporation, for their single, You Still Give Me Butterflies.
I’m very pleased to announce that the song has been released on iTunes today! (It will be coming soon to Amazon.com in MP3 format too.)
If you’d like to listen to the sample, write a review, or maybe even buy a copy, please visit: http://www.djwesley.com/butterflies/
As soon as the original artists permits me to do so, I’ll be posting a longer sample of the remix on my MySpace and Facebook pages.
If you do choose to pick-up a copy, I very much appreciate it. But if you like the remix, and/or the original song, I encourage and would appreciate you posting a positive review on iTunes.
I’ll post additional information about this project soon. Thank you in advance for your support.
1 comment January 29, 2009
Some people still don’t get it
I was reading the New York Times online this morning, as I usually do each morning over my first cupper, focusing (also as usual) on business and technology. One of the articles that got my attention was one with the headline, Europe’s Twisted Path Away From AM Radio.
It was interesting reading enough, but I was struck by how most of what I read about radio (whether terrestrial or satellite, analog or digital) simply overlooks what I feel is the real trend, the real threat to traditional radio, and it received one sentence at the bottom of the article: “Many radio stations are streamed over the Internet.”
To that sentence, I’d like to add a few points:
- Yes, many radio stations (in this context, conventional radio stations) are in fact streamed over the Internet. There are thousands of such stations from around the world doing just that, and along with them are thousands more Internet-only radio stations. (I have a vested interest here, since I’m program director at one of them, iDanceRadio.fm.)
- Together, conventional and Internet-only radio stations streaming their content provide something that Sirius XM, terrestrial (AM and FM) radio, and digital radio don’t, and frankly never can: a “radio band” (the Internet) with tens of thousands of “channels,” with every conceivable format, genre of music, and nature, from talk radio to bagpipe music.
- It is possible today to listen to Internet radio, easily and conveniently, with mobile smartphone devices like the BlackBerry and iPhone, and as mobile devices get smarter and more capable, and cellular networks continues to offer greater bandwidth, it’s not unreasonable to expect that this method of listening to “radio” will only expand in the years to come.
It’s true that mobile Internet streaming is a geeky thing at present. You have to have an unlimited data plan to go with your smartphone, and you have to be geeky enough to figure out how to find, install and use the sometimes cumbersome software. But it’s not by any means difficult, and as I can personally attest—I listen to iDanceRadio.fm on my BlackBerry for hours and hours each week during commutes and errands—the experience is quite good. (Yes, the connection drops occasionally, but it’s easily restarted, and it’s a surprisingly rare event on my Sprint network powered BlackBerry Curve.)
In any case, I have yet to see a single article from a major news outlet that even mentions this way of listening to radio. The New York Times article I referenced merely talks about how Apple hasn’t put a radio receiver in the iPod; well, in a manner of speaking, they did put one in the iPhone. And Sprint put one in my BlackBerry, too, in the form of the semi-tolerable “Sprint TV” application (which also does radio).
I truly believe that this is the future of radio, even if nobody quite sees it yet. Consumers want choice, and Internet radio gives choice. Consumer want mobility, and mobile Internet radio gives mobility. With improvements in hardware and software, mobile Internet radio could also easily deliver what the DVR has brought to cable and satellite television; program buffering to allow pausing and rewinding, and maybe even scheduled recording of programs (the RIAA would love that—not).
But alas, I think sometimes I’m the only one who “gets it.”
Keep listening.
Wes
1 comment January 19, 2009
Random thoughts about dance genres
As I was eating breakfast this morning (I think about these things at weird times), and listening to iDanceRadio.fm, I was somewhat struck by something.
When I first starting DJ’ing almost several years ago, the dance music I preferred was what I’d today call filter house. It goes by a lot of other names too, but the best way I can describe it is modern day disco. It sounds a lot like the disco music of the 70s, but with a more up-to-date “feel” in terms of composition, arrangement and certainly production. (Unfortunately, a bit like the classic court definition of obscenity, you know it when you hear it, but it’s difficult to describe it with mere words.)
Over the past 18 to 24 months, my tastes have slowly evolved toward a harder edged sound, first to what I’d probably call progressive house and electro house, as well as techno in its various forms (which is definitely a bit of an acquired taste, especially for someone in my age group), and more recently, toward trance.
Now, I’ve liked a lot of trance for a long time, but for whatever reason, I’m really getting off on the sound at the moment. I still tend to prefer trance tracks that incorporate vocals and elements of more traditional song form. But even traditional instrumental trance that’s well-produced is increasingly getting my attention, and I continue to be struck by its similarities with classical music (rich textures, rises and falls in energy levels, and so forth).
In programming iDanceRadio.fm (and in my own DJ sets too), I work very hard to select tracks which, for lack of a better word to describe it, are “commercial.” There’s a lot of dance music out there, from artists who clearly put a lot of effort and passion into their work. Judging music is always very subjective, but I hear an awful lot of dance music that just, for lack of a better way to put it, lacks polish. The songwriting is pedestrian; the production screams that it was done by someone without a lot of experience; perhaps the engineering itself was off (it wasn’t mastered properly); or maybe the vocals are just badly sung or badly recorded.
But when a song is simply well-done, it catches my ear, and it doesn’t generally matter anymore whether it’s soft and squishy filter house, or the edgiest hardstyle techno, or various points in between. Quality is quality, and quality gets played… In my sets, and on iDanceRadio.fm.
The great thing is that quality comes from a lot of different places. It can come from a major artist on a major label, and it can come from the unknown trance producer barely out of high school working in his basement. It can come from California here in the U.S., and it can come from a small town in Austria.
The fun part about my job is discovering those gems and getting them heard. And the great thing about programming iDanceRadio.fm is that I’m never told what to play. The whole point is to provide tremendous variety in dance music styles. I have that luxury in a lot of the DJ’ing I do as well, and the good news is that there’s a lot of great material out there—regardless of what genre label you want to apply to it.
Keep listening.
Wes
2 comments January 2, 2009
New Year’s Eve party in Second Life
As many of you know, I actually starting my DJ’ing career inside the virtual online world known as Second Life. While I’ve branched well out of that at this point, there’s a tradition I started a couple of years ago that I’ll be continuing this year.
Back in 2006, I did my first DJ Wesley’s New Year’s Eve Bash, where I had the crazy idea of leveraging Second Life’s international reach and audience to ring-in the new year live across Europe, and across the Americas. I did it again in 2007, and almost unbelievably, it’s time to do it again in 2008 to ring-in 2009.
This year’s event is a little different; I’ll be doing it at The Pavilion Nightclub, a virtual club sponsored by the very real life CAPP Records. But what hasn’t change is that I’ll be counting down to 2009 in Central Europe, and again in the GMT time zone. I’ll get a couple of hours’ break, and then will crank-up the party once again at 11:00 PM in the Atlantic time zone (that’s one zone farther east than Eastern time). I’ll countdown the new year in each time zone all the way to Pacific.
While it’s a very (very!) long party for me, I really enjoy doing it. This year, we’ll be simulcasting the entire party—all of it—on iDanceRadio.fm. That way, people outside of Second Life can join in the fun too (even if some of the Second Life-specific stuff may sound a little strange to them!).
If you have no idea what Second Life is all about, you might want to check it out and join us on New Year’s Eve. All the details are on their web site at secondlife.com. You can get an account absolutely free, and see what all the buzz is about.
Once you’re joined, or if you already have a Second Life membership, just come to the club on New Year’s Eve night, in any (or all!) of the time zones I mentioned above, and join the fun. You can port right to the club with your Second Life viewer software by clicking this link: http://tinyurl.com/pavilioninsl
Even if you don’t have a Second Life membership, or just plain don’t want one, you can still tune-in at iDanceRadio.fm and enjoy the music and general craziness that’s bound to ensue. 
I hope to “see” you there!
Add comment December 30, 2008
Checking-in, and some exciting news
Hey everyone.
Sometimes maintaining a blog is easier than other times, and unfortunately, life has sorta been spankin’ my butt this past month, so the updates and playlist postings and what-not have taken a bit of a back seat.
For the astute among you, you’ll notice I caught-up the playlists for the mixshows this evening; they’re all up and current. And the Top 25 Dance Chart on my web site is up-to-date now as well.
Also from the Good News Department, the remix I recently completed for Worldwide Groove Corporation will be released soon. Kurt Goebel and Ellen Tift, the members of WGC, recently initiated a cool project to have DJs around the world provide remixes to a few of their incredible chill tracks. I did one for their track You Still Give Me Butterflies. While I didn’t really intend for it to turn-out ambient, it did, but I’m pleased with the result, and I’m even more pleased that Kurt and Ellen are pleased.
I’ll let you know when the track is available for purchase on iTunes and Amazon.com. Sometime soon, it’ll be on my MySpace and Facebook pages for preview, too.
And for those who might wonder, yes, I have a few more projects actively underway. 2009 should be exciting indeed!
Add comment December 8, 2008
SIRIUS still sucks
Back in March, I wrote a blog posting titled SIRIUS sucks where I laid bare my gripes about the SIRIUS satellite radio service, which are many, and still quite applicable.
This morning, I heard by e-mail from DJ JC Simon, one of the mixshow jocks whose work aired on SIRIUS. I happened to notice JC’s e-mail before the one I received from SIRIUS announcing a new channel line-up, and his e-mail prompted me to go investigate what had changed.
The bottom line is that SIRIUS, following their recent merger with XM, finally got around to realigning their programming and eliminating a lot of duplication. Fair enough; it’s precisely this sort of consolidation that delivers value (in theory) to stockholders in a merger situation. Several XM channels have been eliminated and replaced by existing programming from SIRIUS, and some SIRIUS channels were cut in favor of programming originating from XM.
Of note to JC is what’s happened with dance. The Beat, SIRIUS’ primary mainstream dance channel, got the axe, being replaced with (what I feel to be the superior) BPM, a channel originating out of XM. Frankly, I’m not shedding any tears about The Beat’s elimination. While the mixshow content was good, the day-to-day radio programming was never satisfactory to me, and as I noted in my last posting, hosts like Mr. Seth made as much sense being a radio personality, as Tabasco sauce makes sense being used as frosting for a lemon cake.
While I feel badly for DJ JC Simon, and I sure don’t like opportunities for fellow DJs being eliminated, frankly, I was “over” SIRIUS a year ago, and nothing about the new channel line-up is likely to change my mind. While I’m apt to give a listen to BPM in the office at my day job, to see if it’s as good as I remember from listening to it on the net, chances are excellent I won’t bother for long.
What I think is the real next wave here is streaming Internet radio. Sure, Internet radio has been around for years. First, it was a free-for-all, with thousands of kids in their basement playing whatever they wanted to whoever would listen. Then came the onerous royalty requirements from SoundExchange, and things are still in an uproar. Internet radio may not yet have a financial model that makes sense in most cases, but I have tremendous faith that it’ll all be sorted out, and that Internet radio is really the Next Big Thing (even as it seems old hat to many of us).
But who wants to be tethered to their PCs? You don’t have to be. I listen to streaming Internet radio on my BlackBerry every day. In my car. At the office. At home. At the gym. Sure, unlike SIRIUS I can’t listen to streams on my BlackBerry while tooling down I-70 in the middle of Kansas, but I have an iPod for that. iPhone users have the same capability, and the software to do it is free. That’s why we’re emphasizing this mode of listening at iDanceRadio.fm, the fledgling online radio station I’m a part of.
Honestly, I think THAT is where the future is headed. In another couple of years, G3 (or G4 or WiMax or whatever) mobile broadband is going to be so widespread that I probably will be able to listen to iDanceRadio.fm in the middle of Kansas.
So who really needs SIRIUS anyway? Not me, and frankly, I don’t want it.
7 comments November 12, 2008
A new addition to the family
I’m a bit late in writing about this, but there’s a new addition to my family. Well, so to speak; no, I’m not a proud father of a bouncing baby, but rather, the proud owner of a shiny new Allen & Heath XONE:4D mixer/controller.
Last December, I acquired a XONE:3D, after lusting over the thing for most of 2007, and saving my pennies and nickels so I could afford to buy one. (It was a lot of pennies and nickels, so much saving was involved.)
Unfortunately, my ownership experience with the 3D wasn’t the best. Within the first month, I returned home from a gig to find most of the unit dead when I hooked it back up in my studio. Three weeks of being without it later (shipped off to get repaired), it was fine… For awhile, and then suddenly it started having a number of minor but annoying problems that slowly became more major over time.
Ordinarily, that might make me want to dump the thing and try something else. But most any digital DJ who’s tried a XONE:3D probably feels as I do: You’d have to pry this thing from my cold, dead fingers to get it away from me.
To make a long and sordid story a bit shorter, I actually did get rid of the XONE:3D, but not before using a replacement 3D for a few months, finding it perfectly reliable and robust, and making me even more confident that my original 3D was, simply, a lemon. It happens, even with the best of products I suppose.
I got rid of the 3D, yes. However, the day I did so was the day I got a new XONE:4D. The 4D addresses a number of the 3D’s technical shortcomings, and adds some great new capabilities, but otherwise retains everything I loved about the 3D. To get the 4D away from me, you’d not only have to pry off my cold, dead fingers, but figure out how to unchain it from my cold, dead body.
Honestly, I just can’t imagine DJ’ing any other way.
My full review of the XONE:4D and its improvements over the 3D is coming out in DJ Times in the November issue, which will hit newsstands and subscribers’ mailboxes in the next couple of weeks.
Add comment October 25, 2008
Some changes to the chart “buy” links
Those who’ve seen my weekly Top 25 Dance Chart are probably aware that I place “buy” links in the rightmost column for every entry I can. I do this for several reasons:
- To support the artists by making it easy to buy their material.
- As a service to listeners so they can know immediately that a track is available for sale, and can go buy it on-the-spot.
- To make a few pennies each time somebody buys something.
To that third point, believe me, I make about enough money each month to buy a snack at Taco Bell (but I think of you each time I do, of course).
Until today, I’ve been linking to iTunes and Beatport. These referral and commission systems are called “affiliate programs” in the web business, and for high-visibility, high-traffic web sites, they can be a real money maker for the site referring the traffic, and for the stores being referred to.
In any event, I’ve pulled the plug on Beatport, and replaced it with links to Amazon’s MP3 download store. Like Beatport, they sell MP3 files, free of DRM (copy protection), that can be loaded onto any portable music player, or played by virtually anything that can play digital music at all (cell phones, PCs, whatever).
But unlike Beatport, Amazon doesn’t play favorites with record labels, they don’t care about an affiliate’s sales volumes, and they don’t force customers to use a slick Flash-based web interface that looks sexy but otherwise inhibits usability. Beatport also seems to over-emphasize certain genres of dance and electronic, which is fine I suppose, but they honestly just don’t carry a lot of the stuff I play anyway.
Many people have told me they don’t like iTunes; others don’t seem to care. I have nothing against iTunes per se; I have an iPod (three of them, actually), so I shop there too from time to time. iTunes Plus certainly removes the DRM aspect from the discussion, but they still sell AAC files, not MP3s. And given that MP3 files will play on just about anything, I will probably start emphasizing Amazon links going forward.
In the end, I don’t really care much whether you click the links on my chart or not, or whether you prefer Amazon, or iTunes, or Masterbeat, or Beatport. The real thing for me is that music consumers support the music and the artists they love by buying their music instead of stealing it. Most musical artists make their money through live performances, not records, and that’s been true since before the music industry starting falling apart. But for dance artists, live performance opportunities are few, leaving music sales as the main revenue source. Hopefully you’ll ponder that a bit the next time you’re wanting the lastest dance track, and keep an already very small “industry” alive.
Wes
1 comment October 21, 2008
Introducing the DJ Wesley Friday Night House Party
Starting tonight (Friday, October 17, 2008), I’ll be spinning a new mixshow on iDanceRadio.fm. We’re calling it The DJ Wesley Friday Night House Party, and that’s pretty much what it is… The best in progressive, electro, and some of your favorite mainstream club remixes.
Every Friday, I’ll be mixing live starting at 10:00 PM Eastern (7:00 PM Pacific), initially for two hours, although we might be expanding it to three fairly quickly. I want to emphasize that the show will be live, warts and all. (I’ll prerecord only if I’ll be on vacation, have a gig elsewhere, etc.) So for better or worse, you get to hear it as it’s happening.
Tonight’s show is a bit of a dry-run, so it’s entirely possible that some technical glitch will keep the show from going on as planned, but I’m not too worried. (Worst case, we’ll try again next week.)
The show is sponsored by CAPP Records, and I’m sure I’ll be featuring a few of the best CAPP has to offer.
I welcome your feedback, requests, comments, etc. Please send them by e-mail; contact information is on my web site at djwesley.com.
Finally, please be sure to let your friends know! It’s the perfect primer before you head out clubbing on a Friday night, or even if you’re just hangin’ out at home…
I hope you enjoy it!
Wes
Add comment October 17, 2008
My screen acting debut
OK, so that’s an attention-grabbing headline. The truth is, I did make my screen acting debut, but it’s about 2 seconds or so in length.
The new music video for recording artist Rikah’s track, Everything is Changing, was released just yesterday. (You can view it on YouTube.) Assembled by some of the great folks at Import Sound and Vision in California, the video is set to the great Verano Remix of the song, and blends footage taken last October (2007) in Las Vegas, with some video shot here in Denver at Tracks Nightclub late last year. The Tracks footage includes some energetic dancing crowd shots, with my buddy DJ Brian Howe doing his thing. I had opened for Brian the night the video was taken, and was hanging out with him in the booth during the shoot. You’ll see my brief cameo toward the end of the video. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it. 
Here’s a screen shot in case you do:
DJ Brian Howe and DJ Wesley at Tracks, in the Rikah video
I was surprised to learn that I was in the finished product, and I’m thrilled that it was associated with the amazing Rikah, who is one of the most amazing, most talented people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting—a rare gem of a person on every level. (Love ya, baby!)
Enjoy the video at the YouTube link (above), along with all the rest of the videos from recent CAPP Records releases.
Add comment September 19, 2008
