In thinking about ways to broaden my musical horizons, I have decided to periodically look into some websites that focus on musical news.  But going in, I know I have a bit of a problem – I just do not have it in me to consume entertainment news, with the rumors of love lost and found and the sad cases of celebrities gone wild that far too often end tragically.  Plenty of that news finds its way in front of my eyeballs as I just go about my regular news surfing.  I want instead to find something a little more interesting, something about the music as well as its players and composers, but that doesn’t delve into celebrity culture.

Today, my quick search turned up thisdayinmusic.com, which provides a podcast, though it wouldn’t play for me, and a list of happenings in pop musical history on this month and day, as well as a list of birthdays.  Its bare-bones format lacks sensationalized anything, which definitely makes me happy –  It seems like what a baseball statistician might make out of a passionate pursuit of pop music trivia.  There is, on the other hand, a page of celebrity mugshots (“I Fought the Law”).  It’s a British site, and it skews a bit heavily in favor of British rock stars from the not too distant past.

On the site, I:

• learned that Elvis, Shirley Bassey, and David Bowie all share/d today as their birthday.
• scanned over many stats about artists’ and songs’ time spent on pop charts.  These sorts of things are not too interesting to me.
• was reminded that it’s been 13 years since Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl Wants.”  That kind of makes me feel old.

So it’s a decent site that does what it does.  I don’t think it will make the daily reading list, but I’m not sad I dropped by.

Thanks for reading.

Ryan