Finding a name and cover art is the biggest pain in the ass putting these playlists together.
Our “Next to You” playlist is all sexy house beats, but naming it with some variation of Sex & House (ex: House Be Sexy) gets old fast. You do want those keywords for discoverability, but the name of a playlist is its second introduction, the artwork is its first. Both are important to catch the listeners eye initially.
I just fell in love with the Flamingosis track, Next to You. It may not have the same vibe as the rest of the list, but the name couldn’t match it more.
The popularity of mashups have been quickly dying off since 2012, mostly due to major label pressures on SoundCloud and other music services. I miss ’em, so I finally decided to put together a list of my most favorite ones.
I split mashups into two categories. The first takes samples from many pop songs all compiled into one. The first few on our playlist are good examples. The other is a vocal track mixed in with an instrumental. It might not have as many moving parts as the other, but I bet it’s just as difficult to make it sound right, if not more. Putting two sounds together and making them sound like one is hard for any producer, let alone one working with sounds people are so familiar with.
Judge for yourself, but it’s important to keep in mind that mashups are for fun and don’t always sound the most polished.
Late Night Jazz was going for new producers’ takes on jazz, but we got some criticism on if they were really jazz songs. I even questioned a few, but all had some form of jazz style in it.
I stretched the style a lot more this time around, so we decided on a word not as narrowly defined. Some beautiful guitar, sax and piano playing on these 20. This kind of music is not getting appreciated enough. Here’s mine.
I grew up listening to Prince mostly because of my pops. Living in a suburb south of St. Paul for all of my childhood, I didn’t appreciate the Minneapolis music scene until I got out of it and left for college out West.
There I started to appreciate hip-hop and R&B on a much more personal level. Getting in much deeper with Prince, Atmosphere and other Minnesota acts towards the end of college, including Solid Gold, GAYNGS and Mel Gibson & the Pants. Finally, in the Bay Area I found Polica, Tickle Torture, thestand4rd, and most recently, Morly. Well, kinda.
I stayed in Minneapolis for a few years after college and covered my first show, Theophilus London at The Loft, in early 2012. There I heard one of the openers and fell in love (with her voice). It belonged to Katy Morley, now known as Morly. I remember tracking Astronautalis and her down to see if they had any music released. She didn’t, but I remember her telling me something was in the works.
Four years later and I run into her music while researching a post on Minneapolis (this one). Her voice is even more touching and her piano playing stands out more.
It’s good to have such talent sprouting from the Twin Cities. A lot of which have Prince all over them. Here’s a dozen or so and their songs.
We’re starting to break our remix playlists into genres. Our first was relaxing hip hop remixes and now we’ve got soulful R&B, and some just soulful (we did have a tropical remix list in between).
The list of soul started off as general relaxing remixes, but it was pretty much all some sort of soul so we trimmed it down to that. Apparently I only like hip hop and soul now.
I’ve never put out a playlist that I felt was incomplete, but trying to get at least an hours worth of female producers was the most difficult list I’ve ever compiled.
About four months back, I started to put together the playlist, but couldn’t get more than six or seven girls I wanted to feature. So like never before, I asked about a dozen friends in music who their favorite female producers were. Well, they had just as hard of a time.
I only managed to get twelve gals in the end, so I thought I’d open it up to a few friends and try to raise a little awareness of how female producers are really lacking. I’d say it’s the worse in any form of art, except directing film probably.
Here are eight lists consisting of over 80 female producers. If you come up with your own playlist, send it over and we’ll add it to the collection!
We anti-Valentined last year with our Hip Hop + Heartbreak, thanks to the help of mimb, and this year we’re covering everything but (hip hop).
Most of heartbroke (as fuck) is some sort of soul music along the electronic scale, leaning heavy on electronic near the end.
If you’re in for a lonely Valentine’s this year, I hope this makes for a good background soundtrack.
My dad bought a 2013 Corvette and wanted to get a custom license plate. The guy’s a real charmer, but he couldn’t convince the dmv agent to put ‘4play’ on his license plate.
I thought of beats4play when starting up our YouTube channel – I think Silence Nogood was taken – and I loved how it brought on a few more meanings than my dad’s original line.
Here’s a solid hour and some of music foreplay.
We haven’t had a proper disco list on here for years, but our groovewit & tits held us over last year. For our first list this year, we bring the best disco for dancing.
Frisco Disco came from a producer’s name I misread at first, Frico Disco, but I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere else before. I gotta give it to 95 Royale for introducing us to this style of disco house – disco pop vocals with a heavy house kick – and after more than three years we finally got all the best of it together.
Disco is having another revival. Here’s out toast to it.
2015 was the year of live music for us. We covered eight festivals. I don’t think I’ve been to that many before in my life.
Hip hop seemed to make a return on here. That’s what we started on, but hit a major dip from 2010 to 2013. It started back up in 2014 with Kendrick Lamar, and predecessors have been poppin’ up all over the place since. Some with possibly more potential than Kendrick himself. One at the top of this list.
Other genres in electronic dominated the year even more. We got out a good amount of Kawaii in the first half, but future & trap took over the second. And of course house has been most dominate. Going from the deeper, heavier side and splitting into future & chill house near the end, as well as the funkier side of house music to jack to.
The amount of new singers seems to have dipped compared to past years, but the quality hasn’t. Anderson Paak, Madelyn Grant, Liz Vice & Joey Dosik to name out of the dozen others with clear personalities in their voices.
We’ve collected 29 tracks in total and a list of our 12 musicians with the most potential. Plus our biggest accomplishments of the year below that, the playlists. We put together 35 in total! That’s up from 25 last year.