John Lennon Educational Tour Bus Brings Unique Music Experience to Schools

For 17 years, the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus has brought music recording and video production experiences to students all over the USA with their high-tech (and colorful) bus. With the assistance of three on-board engineers, students learn how to write, perform, record, and produce original songs, produce and shoot music videos and documentaries and complete a broadcast quality music video – all in a single day. Boy what I would have done to have experienced something like this when I was in school! Endorsed by John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, the bus is also supported by long list of corporate partners including Apple, Sony, Yamaha, Gibson and many more

From the LennonBus.org website:

The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus is highly adaptable, and is designed to provide students, their schools and communities with performances, demonstrations, remote recordings, and studio sessions customized for their needs, levels of experience and interest. The bus travels the country visiting schools, musical and technology conferences and events, and partners with newspapers and other media to host Battles of the Bands with the national winner selected online

I recently learned that the tour bus will be visiting a school just 10 minutes from where we live, so we are hoping to get a up close glimpse of what they are doing and will do another post about it.

I can remember very clearly the time period when John Lennon passed away. I was playing in a wedding & club band called "The Sound Of Gold" and we played many Beatles songs with the band leader Mark Tully taking the Lennon parts and me doing my best with the McCartney parts (my voice was definitely still developing then :)). I remember we played a New Years Eve event just 3 weeks after he passed and performed a tribute to Lennon with a heavy dose of Lennon influenced Beatles songs along with some Lennon solo tunes. To this day I still perform "Imagine" whenever, wherever I can. This song along with "Let There Be Peace On Earth", perfectly embody what each and every person in this world need to fully embrace, one by one. I can only hope that through music, arts and other non-violent means we can slowly move towards this end for the human race.

I'll leave you with the song that John Lennon is most remembered for.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
No religion too
Imagine all the people, living life in peace..

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

I hope you have a wonderful day and stay tuned for some more fun posts coming this week on "how music can help you!" :)

Music, Love & Laughter,

Vincent James @ LoveSongs.com www.facebook.com/KeepMusicAliveMission

Apple and U2 - "Songs of Innocence" not so Innocent!

So it seems about a week ago, Apple and U2 decided to band together and release their new album "Songs of Innocence" to the masses. Far from being a traditional release, they instead decided to "give" the album away to the 500 million or so ITunes subscribers on the planet. Seems like a great promotional idea doesn't it? Well maybe 5 years ago it might have been, but now it just seems like a last ditch effort for a once iconic band to stay relevant, AND what has now become a complete PR disaster.

I was a huge U2 back in the day, when the band and their music stood for something a lot more important than making money. Songs like "Sunday, Bloody Sunday", "Pride (in the name of Love)" and "New Years Day" were all about our human struggle and crying out for a better world. But with U2 and the marketing company pocketing a reported $ 100 Million dollars to "give" their music away, it seems the Bono, The Edge and the boys have really lost their way. If U2 really wanted to actually GIVE their music away as a true gift, they wouldn't have felt the need to concoct such an enormous payday for themselves in the process.

I also wonder if Apple would have stooped so low if Steve Jobs were still with us. The other side of this is Apple should have known better than to force free music downloads on the world, at a time when people just don't want downloads anymore. Whether we like it or want it or not, we are in a music streaming world now - the masses have spoken, so now we music creators need to adapt to this new paradigm. Jobs was an extraordinary visionary, and surely would have seen that the U2 download push promotion was a bad idea, and crafted a more creative way to get the buzz Apple was seeking.

Here are just two of my favorite U2 songs from back in the day. First there is "Pride (In the name of Love)":

And then there's "New Years Day":

There was also "With or Without You" and "Where the Streets Have No Name" from the Joshua Tree album in 1987 and "Beautiful Day" from 1993 and "Desire" from 1997. These were all great songs, but I'm having trouble latching onto something that stands out in the last 10-15 years. Instead of a crazy publicity stunt to try and stay relevant, what U2 needs is to go back to their musical roots. Try writing about what really matters in the world, and then deliver that message with the same passion they started out with. I realize that for many artists this is an extremely difficult, if not impossible task. Because of their success, their lives and fortunes have changed so much and its hard to remember what it was really like in the beginning. All we can do is hope Bono and the boys find their way after this incident and manage to come back with a song that really inspires us once again.

NOTE: I tried to find the new U2 album "Songs of Innocence" in my ITunes player and it seems to be hidden very well (or maybe I just need to update to a newer ITunes :)) . Oh well, I'll just head online to stream a few songs and hope that maybe there's still a nugget of greatness among the new U2 tunes.

Music, Love & Laughter,

Vincent James @ LoveSongs.com

Alex B hits 1 Million YouTube views w/"Will You Be My Girl"

Philadelphia's very own up and coming pop star Alex B recently hit 1 Million YouTube views for his song and video "Will You Be My Girl". We recently featured Alex as our Indie Love Songs artist of the month with his groovin' uptempo Pop tune "Rollercoaster". We're so happy to see Alex cross the 1 Million mark for "Will You Be My Girl" that we're giving him an extra month of fame here at LoveSongs.com.

Currently only 14 years old, Alex performs like he has been performing on stage for years and years. He is so amazingly comfortable entertaining the crowd young and old and its obvious he's having the time of his life enjoying the experience. Add to that Alex's growing collection of great original pop songs, you now have a recipe for a big star in the making. Alex has already performed at some of the top venues in the Philadelphia area including the TLA downtown, World Café Live in Wilmington and multiple Xfinity Live events. It's only a matter of time before this young pop star bubbles up onto the national scene.

Check out Alex's "Rollercoaster" now playing on the front page of www.LoveSongs.com till the end of June.

If you haven't already heard "Will You Be My Girl" here's the Official video that crossed the one million mark:

Yet another great pop tune by Alex is "This Thing Called Love" and here's the video:

We will definitely be keeping an eye on Alex's progress towards the national stage and wish him the very best on his journey.

Apple/Beats Music jumping into the Music Streaming World

Apple computers recent acquisition of Beats means that it will be jumping headfirst into the music streaming business competing with Pandora, Spotify and the legions of others. Amazon will also be jumping into the bigger music streaming pool soon as they announced they'll be offering a new Music Streaming service to their millions of Amazon Prime members. All these developments definitely make an interesting story-line for what options we as music lovers have to hear our music (anyone still missing our vinyl records??). Here's a recent article on how the Apple Beats combination might fit into the streaming scene: How Does Apple Beats Shake Up Music Streaming?

Do you currently use Pandora, Spotify or Beats music streaming and if you do how do you like it so far? How would you like to see these services change to better enhance our musical listening experience? Leave a comment here and let us know.

That's all for today folks - be back later this weekend with another post - until then have mucho fun tooooday!

Peace, Love & Laughter,

~Vincent James @ LoveSongs.com

Saturdays Song - "Does Anybody Know" - Jag Star

During the spring this year I had the privliedge of helping to judge entries for the Just Plain Folks music awards. Unfortunately I didn't get to vote in the Pop Song category but if I did "Does Anybody Know" by Jag Star would have been right up there. Fortunately other judges seemed to notice the incredibly strong hook and "Does Anybody Know" ended up winning the Pop Song category. Hailing from Knoxville, Tennessee, Jag Star has had their music featured on many TV shows including The Soup, The Hills and Laguna Beach and even on the David Letterman show. This tunes definitely a beauty you can check it out on their MySpace page, and scroll down to about song #6. Heck while your at it listen to all their songs posted you won't be disappointed.

Jag Star on MySpace

Download Sales Leveling Off - The End of ITunes? - Reuters

Very interesting article about how music downloads are leveling off and streaming music may be the business of the future. Here's a snippet of the article:

"The migration from downloads to streams is driven by several factors. First is the realization that the digital download market is beginning to level off.

While digital downloads account for the vast majority of digital music revenue, they aren't even close to making up for the lost revenue from falling CD sales. That's why labels and digital music services are turning more attention to streaming music access services that carry either a monthly fee or provide opportunities to "upsell" to other products..."

For the full article on whats going on with this go to Music Downloading Article on Reuters.com

That's all for Saturddddday...have a great nite and will be back tomorrow with a classic love song that you may never have heard...its a surprisssse :)

~Vincent