Funky Reincarnation by Marvin Gaye is one of those nice soul gems you don't hear much. This album has a couple different versions but the alternative version has the funkiest bass and drums. You get the feeling Marvin was listening to Parliament/ Funkadelic at this time and wanted to try out a little of the space funk for himself.
As we've been building our music library the past few years Apple has taken the lion's share of our budget for new music. In 2006 we spent almost $600 on Itunes and feel it's important to purchase the music we use and participate in the system. With that said one of the great things about Itunes is how easy it is to search, browse and purchase music. A lot of people would agree that they have been so successful for this reason, it's actually easy to buy a song from Itunes then to go try to find it elsewhere on the web.
The flipside is that imposing a 7 CD burn limit on tracks you purchased and copy protecting MP3s so that they do not work in any other program or on an unauthorized computer. What's with the 5 computer authorization anyway? Don't they know most tech geeks have at least 3 computers? It also mysteriously crashes when you approach the 7 CD burn limit often. So you have all these extra steps, reimporting burned CDs, or using a program like tunebite to re-record the copy protected tracks, just to use music that you purchased. I'm surprised Apple doesn't see how much money they will make if they take out all these restrictions, I honestly think they would move from 3rd to 1st as the largest music retailer in the U.S.
Whenever I'm searching for new music for an event I usually check Itunes, Pandora, and KCRW to see what's out there. Itunes is excellent because you can fire through a lot of music very quickly and that's one of the reasons that it is so popular. There are 
a couple of sites out there worth checking out if you want to build on your Itunes playlists. Mystrands analyzes your Itunes library and builds custom playlists based on your music. The downside is that it requires an additional piece of software to run alongside Itunes.
The Filter is another site which does something similar, you install there software, select 3 songs from Itunes and it creates a new playlist based on those 3 songs. These are great ideas but I think like Pandora in practice you rarely are going to be able to replicate your own selection of music. Although I haven't tried them yet so I may be pleasantly surprised. Two sites beyond these, I Like and Fiql, let you share your Itunes playlists with friends and vice versa, you can sort through other playlists. I would love to see a site take this to another level, where it's djs posting and sharing their playlists with other djs. Imagine how great it would be to have a site where Gilles Peterson and Garth Trinidad were posting and sharing their playlists and how much time it would save you. I often find Imixes to be so random and if you type in a Tito Puente salsa song on Pandora it offers up an Enrique Iglesias ballad as a suggestion. Surely this meta data we are all creating can but put together in a way that's more effective.
