Pond Crosser

Have you ever been the first person in your group of friends to discover a song? You feel so tapped in, so ahead of the game, and every time your friends hear the song, they think of you. The feeling of glory is awesome, and I thrive on it. So, when it came time for me to write a blog for my journalism class I figured I would bring my song sharing to people outside of my group of friends.

So where do I find my songs? I primarily use the UK pop charts. The British may be known for horrible food, but I have to give it to them on the music front. Obviously the charts feature some American songs, but many of the songs that blow up the Billboard charts are old news on the UK charts (and vice versa). They’re updated every Sunday, just like the Billboard Charts in the US, which I also use to find songs.

There’s one other place I use to find music,RCRDLBL.com. I hadn’t really considered it part of my main musical repertoire until the day that one song I had downloaded from the site appeared on the UK charts (Gold Dust by. You can only imagine how ecstatic I was, I had found a song before the UK charts. I’m pretty sure that will only happen once in my life. Anyway, I hadn’t really connected RCRDLBL to any of the music charts because it features new artists, while the charts usually feature new songs be established artists, but naturally there’s some overlap, which I should have foreseen. The great thing about RCRDLBL.com is that the site features remixes, and often times those remixes are better than the original song. Oh, and did I mention RCRDLBL let’s you download songs from their website.

So here’s the plan for my blog. I’ll go through the UK Top 40 and listen to the new songs. Then, I’ll give readers a write-up of the ones I think are the best, but keep in mind it’s my opinion, so check them out yourself too. I’ll also go through the Billboard Hot 100, just to scan what’s new. I’ll embed artists videos if I think they’re in anyway awesome (sometimes the video can make or break the song). While I’m scanning rcrdlbl.com I’ll link to artist’s pages, especially if the artist is more well known and something interesting is posted on the website.

Tomorrow I’ll post the new songs from the UK charts, but tonight I want to give a little tutorial to ease your search through the UK charts. As I said the charts are updated every Sunday. The status of a song is posted with a symbol on the left side of each song. Yellow stars represent new songs, gray dashes mean the song is in the same ranking as the week before, red arrows down mean the song has moved down on the charts, while blue arrows mean the song has moved up from last week. Also, underneath the artists and name of the song additional information about how much the song has moved since the previous and how many weeks the song has been on the charts is featured.

So, tune in tomorrow for your musical update.