Remember when LeAnn Rimes was famous for singing?

The little 13-year-old yodeling sprite burst onto the scene years ago and everyone was all “she’s Patsy Cline reincarnated!” and she had a nice voice and she was a nice girl who eventually married a nice boy and had a very nice career.

Remember that? It was nice.

But that was before she had a hand in wrecking two marriages when she cheated on her husband with the then-married (and then-unknown) Eddie Cibrian while the two of them were off together shooting some shittastic TV movie no one ever saw.

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If this keeps up, she’ll be walking out to stony silence.

After Tom Petty served GOP presidential candidate (and Tea Party darling) Michele Bachmann with a cease and desist order, demanding she quit using his song “American Girl” during campaign stops, Katrina & The Waves had a little something to say as well.

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American musician Shelby Lynne revealed in an interview that she does not own an iPod, and still listens to vinyl. For the critically acclaimed singer/songwriter, listening to music should be an engaging and interactive experience. After all, you have to get up and turn the LP over. This is the trait of the true audiophile. They interact with the music and refuse to sacrifice sound quality for convenience.  Fortunate enough for most listeners, sound quality on new devices and listeners’ mobile music phone will allow them to maintain a superior sound quality.  However, true audiophiles still prefer the traditional method when enjoying their music.

Unfortunately, they’ve had to find their place within the mass listening public who want it fast, cheap and easy to acquire. One might say the evolution of the audiophile has gone from vinyl to dead. However, they still exist, and thank goodness. Because of them, even the cheap and fast presentation of music is returning to the superior sound quality of the late 1980s.

The Walkman – The Beginning of the End?

A true audiophile demands clarity and high sound integrity in the listening experience. The problem is that LPs aren’t portable. People needed portability, so Sony introduced the first step towards total music freedom. You might say The Walkman was the messenger of death for the recording industry as we knew it.

Audiophiles are a hardy bunch, so they spent hours with their turntables and a cassette recorder making some of the coolest mix tapes ever heard. In the beginning, it seemed The Walkman was actually deepening the listening experience. Then along came the next step in the evolution of recorded music.

The CD Killed The Sound of Music Purity… Or Did It?

Remember those early CDs? They labeled the sound production as AAD, ADD, DAD, and DDD. Basically, it was a message for the audiophile. That guy was an analogue junky. Life is analogue, so sound had to be recorded on analogue tape. The CD gently moved the ultimate listener to a totally digital experience in three steps. Now, there was no way around it. CD killed the LP and the purity of sound. Sony caught on fast and introduced the CD Walkman.

It was only natural that recordable CDs would come along. Now the audiophile was uploading CDs to his computer, creating play lists and burning mix CDs. That was a previously cumbersome experience, and technology fixed it fast.

Those totally digital files eventually became the super compressed mp3s which could be downloaded onto digital players that could hold an unbelievable number of songs. The audiophile was gently erased as we knew him – the listeners that were left fell in love with quantity. The audiophile’s quest for music moved from perfect sound to the search for perfect music performance.

Piracy Was Invented By the New Audiophile

When you live for the newest, most creative and most cutting edge sounds in music, you need a little community of helpers. It didn’t take long for file sharing to emerge. Audiophiles were sharing like crazy. The problem was that all of those amazing musicians weren’t getting their royalties. The recording industry went to its knees.

All it could do was sue. Nigerian pirates have nothing on a 15 year old with a computer in the heyday of companies like Napster. Since the courts demanded that file sharing be legit, piracy had to get on the right track and start to offer music in a way that satisfied the new breed of audiophile without hanging their beloved artists out to dry.

The artist had already made the move to a do-it-yourself way of making music, so they were fast to jump on the technology train and what could be called the social networking of music.

Streaming Music Brings Peace to All Concerned

Today, the audiophile has multiple options for finding and listening to music at a low cost, or even free. Companies like Pandora and MOG allow listeners to create digital radio stations that are centered around a particular sound or artist. The artists love it too. If an independent artist sounds like Shawn Colvin and the audiophile creates a Shawn Colvin station, then that similar artist gets introduced to a new listener. These streaming stations are based on production similarities in the music. It might be beats, or instrumentation, or tempo – it’s really incredible. For the first time in an artist’s career, the insult of “you sound like (fill in the famous musician blank)” has become a profitable compliment.

And What About That Old Guy? The Purist Audiophile.

Oh. That guy? He’s getting his way. Technology is finding ways to improve the quality of sound and bring it back to the clear, untampered with source that gave birth to the ultimate listener. Everything from tightly compressed files to improved portable sound equipment takes the listening experience full circle.

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Remember when teens spent hours flipping through albums or CDs in the local music store? Most of you probably don’t – it’s like those stories parents tell about walking to school, in the snow, without shoes, uphill, both ways. You hear it, but you just can’t believe it.

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With the growth of mobile devices and the powerful apps that transform them into mini entertainment centers, albums, CDs, and even broadcast radio are dying a not-so-slow death. In fact, listening to tunes on a desktop is considered passé in today’s fast-paced world.

Along the way, these innovations have changed the way we think about music. Instead of simply liking what we’re programmed to like by the local radio stations or the music store, the floodgates have been opened, exposing tech-savvy youth to a wealth of alternative, foreign, and indie music.

The trick for consumers is to pick the right music app out of the hundreds that are available for mobile music. To help you make the right choice, the following list takes a close look at the best options:

PANDORA MOBILE

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Price: Service is a free companion service with the desktop application. Desktop app is free for a basic plan with ads, and includes up to 40 hours of play each month; other subscription options require a monthly fee.

Devices: Android, Palm Pre, Blackberry, and Windows

Network Requirements: 3G or WiFi

Music Sharing: Twitter, Facebook, and Email

Offline Capable: No

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Pandora is one of the most popular desktop applications used to create fully-customized streaming radio stations to perfectly fit your taste in music. With Pandora Mobile, you can:

• access personal stations from just about anywhere
• create new stations on-the-go
• rate new songs
• bookmark personal favorites

In fact, the desktop version and mobile app are fully integrated for seamless use. Keep in mind that Pandora maintains a radio station format. This means you won’t be able to create playlists or play a single song or artist continuously.

GROOVESHARK ANYWHERE

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Price: Free 14 day-50 song trial. Subscriptions cost $9/month or $90/year

Devices: Android, Palm WebOS, Blackberry, and Symbian

Network Requirements: 3G or WiFi

Music Sharing: Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Email

Offline Capable: No

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Grooveshark has taken their popular web-based music app mobile with Grooveshark Anywhere. This fee-based version allows users to browse the Grooveshark catalog from “anywhere” that can access a 3G or WiFi connection, including both songs and playlists.

To make it even more exciting, Grooveshark has a number of customizable features, including a ton of different skins. Pickles, the tubby Panda guide, will show you everything you need to know about Grooveshark as your tutorial guide.

SLACKER RADIO PLUS

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Price: $3.99/month

Devices: Android, Palm WebOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone 7

Network Requirements: 3G or WiFi

Music Sharing: Twitter and the Slacker Forum

Offline Capable: Yes

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The name alone makes trying Slacker Radio worth it, but the “CNET Editor’s Choice” designation confirms it’s a great app. It includes over 100 pre-configured radio stations, designed with very specific genres in mind, or you can create your own.

With this fee-based service, you won’t have any ads to get in your way; you will get unlimited song skipping, and you can even cache songs to play when you don’t have a good connection. Best of all, you can even get the song lyrics, to make sure you don’t sound like a complete idiot if you like to belt out a few tunes to a Slacker backup.

There is a completely free Slacker Radio plan, too—but, the additional features that come with the Plus version are well worth this small monthly fee. If you’d like to up your music-listening expenses to $9.99 each month for Slacker Premium, you can add on-demand access to songs and full albums to your feature list.

Just like Pandora, Slacker Radio doesn’t allow you to choose your own songs or playlist. Instead, it selects songs for you based on your voting history and listening habits. Although this can be great, it might make listening to a completely new musical style a little challenging.

RDIO

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Price: $4.99/month

Devices: Android and Blackberry

Network Requirements: 3G or WiFi

Music Sharing: Twitter and Facebook

Offline Capable: Yes

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This inexpensive app combines a ton of features into one, seamless mobile package. Without leaving Rdio, you can:

• Follow your friends on Facebook or Twitter
• Create playlists
• Listen to a ton of songs
• Tune into artist-created radio stations
• Save your favorites for later
• Sync your Rdio app to your iTunes library to create a one-stop-shop for listening to your favorite songs on-the-go.

If you’re always asking for advice from your trend-setting friends, you can stop bugging them when you get a Rdio subscription: just check out what they’re listening to using Rdio’s Facebook or Twitter interface, and set your dial to a new set of favorites.

SPOTIFY PREMIUM

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Price: US rates are unavailable at this time

Devices: Android

Network Requirements: 3G or WiFi

Music Sharing: Twitter, Spotify, and Facebook

Offline Capable: Yes

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As a Spotify Premium subscriber, you’ll have instant access to over 13 million tracks of the hottest music, in addition to your own selection of audio files. Although the paid subscription is a requirement for using the mobile app and offline listening, Spotify Premium also allows you to skip the ads, and access exclusive content like pre-release tracks and concert ticket giveaways.

For the best sound quality, Spotify streams your music at the highest bitrates possible. Spotify Premium also includes a radio feature and makes sharing music with friends easy. All you have to do is send a link to a favorite song or playlist, and they can check it out instantly.

Like group projects? Spotify makes group collaborations to create shared playlists simple. Although the full, for-pay versions of the Spotify app are only available in a limited number of countries at this time, expect to see these new features rolled out to your area soon.

CONCLUSION

With either of these great mobile apps, it’ll be easier than ever to listen to exactly what YOU want to hear at home, at work, at school, or anywhere else you go. Whether you listen in solitude, or jam with your friends, is completely up to you.

Hunger and Thirst, Typhoon (Tender Loving Empire, 2010)
Review by Jeremy Alder for PopCrunch.com

One of the strange things about human desire is that we often don’t know what we want until we find it (or it’s given to us). That was the feeling I had when first listening to the album Hunger and Thirst, the second album by Portland, Oregon’s best kept secret, Typhoon. I was left wondering, “Where has this album been all my life?” It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for, and I don’t think I’m the only one.

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