Here's a special treat for you. With me and Amy in LA at the IDEA fitness conference, Master Trainer Dennis Mellon (new title for Dennis – more about his advancement in a week or so) has provided a three track mash-up for you to add to your next class playlist + a high quality recording of him teaching the actual class.
Start by listening to how Dennis cues this 9:54 minute three song mash-up, recorded during an actual class – download it here.
Here's the three song mash-up you can download to add to iTunes. Right click here > save as…
Dennis and I would love to know if these longer music segments are of value to you. Please leave your review below.
Turning the tables a little bit this week. The owners of the cycle studio where I teach on Monday's and Friday's: http://cyclequeststudio.com/ are awesome! Patti (Joe's wife) pops into my class whenever she can and loves rock music. In an effort to ‘keep the boss happy' I try to incorporate a couple rock tunes into each of my profiles.
I'm starting to like ‘grunge' rock a bit myself.
This week's tune is not new, but it's really good- from a Seattle based American rock band founded in 1984.
It's a hard driving flat (heavy on the bass) at 93 rpm's and 4:07.
John emailed me yesterday and said, ‘What about this song????' and I replied, ‘I love it….been using it in my profile for the last 3 months!' and he said, ‘Of course you have..'
It's a great climb at 62 rpm's with a feel good background rhythm from this unsuspecting Norwegian songwriting duo. I've been using it early on in the ride, as we head into our first threshold and establish that as our base for riding and commit to never dropping below it for the rest of our ride together.
Spotify has added an Equalizer to their iPhone App in the latest update. NOTE: Spotify triggers software upgrades progressively, to groups of users over time. If you're not seeing the notification (pictured above) – you will soon.
This morning I saw the new notice, while I was checking that I had my playlist set to off-line mode and that it would play. This is cool, I thought and I had the chance to acquaint myself with how it worked, before my 6:00 am class. Wearing my ear buds, I found that the Electronic preset sounded the best… turns out I was wrong.
You'll find the new Equalizer in; Settings > Playback > (Scroll down) Equalizer toggle to turn it on/off. Spotify gives you 22 pre-set EQ settings or you can drag any of the six frequency ranges up/down to create you own personal settings.
I'm not sure why, but it seemed like I had to adjust both the sound system's and my iPhone's to a much higher volume level than normal. Please let me know if you experience something similar.
Class sounded OK – well actually I couldn't hear any difference where I sit. After class I connected my bluetooth receiver, so I could stand in the middle of the room to hear what my class hears – while changing the EQ settings.
Now I realise that this is completely subjective; what sounds good to me, may or may not be your preference and every studio's acoustics is different. The R&B setting sounded best, using Morgan Page — In the Air (feat. Angela McCluskey) as my demo track.
That track was part of today's playlist – 45 minutes. I built it from a larger playlist I followed from Instructor Gregg Pitts who teaches at Zengo Cycle in Washington DC – Gregg Pitts Cycle July Tunes. Gregg was featured in this Active Life DC fitness instructor profile. Here's my playlist.
I find it fascinating to watch all the posturing going on in the digital music delivery business. It all started with iTunes – who ruled the legal, digital download space for years. Multiple services (ZUNE, Rhapsody, Napster, etc…) have tried, and failed to take more than a tiny amount of market share from Apple.
But that's all changing because of Spotify, Deezer and a little company called Google. The article below opened my eyes to why.
In an interesting turn of events, Apple is reportedly considering opening up and launching their own streaming music service to compete with the likes of similar services like Spotify and the newly released Beats music. In addition to this they are apparently considering launching an Android app for the streaming service to go along with the launch of the service itself, all in an effort to attack the declining sales of US iTunes music downloads according to sources that are close to the matter. People still use iTunes? All jokes aside, it has been difficult for apple to compete with services that offer streaming music at a low price, as the music libraries are competitively similar in size, and listening is unlimited, all for a small monthly fee. Downloading the same number of songs through iTunes that you would have at your disposal with a service like Spotify would take massive amounts of money, even with most songs on iTunes being available as singles with most as low as $0.99 a hit.
It’s interesting to hear these possibilities as Apple and iTunes have always been known to be a partnered exclusive company and service. While Google’s popular Google Play Music is available on multiple platforms including Mac, Windows, Android and iOS, Apple’s iTunes is only accessible to those who use iOS devices or Mac computers. They have effectively closed themselves off from other possibilities for quite some time, and it used to work for them when they were the dominating force in digital music. With the iPod reaching its end of life though, and a myriad of subscription based music services available on virtually any platform you can think of, Apple will have to find a way to take the once reigning king of music services and transform it if they want to compete.
So I did some quick research to see how Apple's iOS competes with Google's Android market share for portable device sales.
… If you look at the raw numbers for sales market share between Android and iOS devices, Google seems to be dominating the space. In Q4 2013, Gartner reported that Android had 77.8% worldwide market share while iOS had only 17.8% share. One quarter prior, Android had 81.9% and iOS took second place with 12.1%. It is worth noting that, according to ComScore, iOS market share in the lucrative US market is about 40%, while Android accounts for around 50% of US sales. The problem with these numbers is that the do not take into account the fragmentation that Google has allowed with the Android platform.
What goes around…comes around
One of the legacies of Steve Jobs was his/Apple's decision to keep iTunes exclusive to iDevices (there is no iTunes App for an Android phone). While this worked to Apple's advantage for years, they now find themselves becoming uncompetitive now that Spotify and Deezer have Apps for both iOS and Android phones.
So what does this mean for you?
Choices, lots of choices for digital music coming with fewer restrictions on how you'll be able to build, share and then deliver great music to your classes. Many of us found Spotify to be revolutionary – it completely changed my views about renting vs. buying music. But now Spotify is SOP (standard operating procedure). I'm guessing that a few years from now we'll be using a music service that doesn't even exist today and we will access it using a device none of us has even seen.
And we can't wait to help you understand how you'll use it in your class 🙂
I've been having fun with the Lazify music discovery App for Spotify. Here's a few of my recent favorites including a resource for free, hour long DJ mixes:
This track Nothing Matters from the artist Tricky makes for a powerful tempo/FTP efforts @ 95RPM. Tricky was an early member of Massive Attack and I found this track in a Lazify playlist built from a Massive Attack song.
Next up is this track from artist/DJ Morgan Page — Fight For You which is an awesome climb @ 64RPM. The song has some great lyrics that you can incorporate into your cuing. I found this in a lazify playlist I started using another Morgan Page track The Longest Road – Deadmau5 Remix Radio Edit which I've used in the past.
You can download the original here if you don't see the download link in the player.
I'm hearing more and more how studios are bringing in live DJ's to supply the music for special events. If you ever wondered what it would be like to teach where someone else is controlling the music – Morgan Page has hundreds of 60 minute mixed MP3's that you could use for a private class… or maybe you're looking for something completely different. Check out a few and let me know if you'd ever consider using them in a class.
