Thirty years ago, New Order released Blue Monday and revolutionised music. Enjoy!
This is Blue Monday
Thirty years ago, New Order released Blue Monday and revolutionised music. Enjoy!
On 31 December, my mission was to make people dance from 22:00 to 03:00 in the morning. Fortunately, I could rely on Mixxx, a fantastic and powerful DJing software available for free for all platforms (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows).
Mixxx performed admirably during the five hours.
On Linux, Mixxx supports MP3 out of the box but as I had quite a lot of AAC (i.e. M4A) files, I had to compile it from source. Here are the commands I used on my Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS box:
sudo aptitude install scons qt3-dev-tools libqt4-dev g++ bzr libportmidi-dev libsndfile1-dev libtag1-dev libmad0-dev libid3tag0-dev libmp4v2-dev libfaad-dev portaudio19-dev
scons -j2 faad=1 shoutcast=0 tuned=1
sudo scons prefix=/usr/local install
The first line is to install all the required dependencies, the second is to compile Mixxx with AAC support (faad=1) and specifically for the processor I was using (tuned=1). The third line is to install it in /usr/local
Have fun DJing with Mixxx :-)
Gangnam Style is the most popular video on YouTube ever… as if I needed to tell you.
The video has been seen 978,000,000 times already. Simple maths tell us that it will probably reach 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) views in a few days.
Interestingly, one of the reasons this song and video are so popular is that PSY, the author, does not try to stop copycats. Thousands, including people here in Mauritius, have done their own interpretations of the song and posted them on YouTube. This has contributed massively towards the buzz for the official video. Naturally, PSY has managed to earn quite a lot of money, mainly by participating in TV commercials in Korea and elsewhere.
Piracy actually has helped sales and made an artist earn his living very very decently. Food for thought.
An update
The video has just reached 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) views on YouTube on 21 December (yeah, the day the world was supposed to end…) Read this very informative article on what Psy raps about and what Gangnam means.