Anna Maria Island Music!

Anna Maria Island Music!

Hey everybody! Check out the awesome little music scene happening up on Anna Maria Island! Myself and a bunch of other local acts having been jamming up there as of late (Come Back Alice, Kettle of Fish, etc), and there’s a lot to see. I’ve got 3 shows scheduled up there now, March 15 7-10pm at The Blue Marlin with my trio (James Dabone on horns and Cort Farris on Drums and Pan), and also March 22nd and April 12th at Dcoy Ducks with my full band (add Garrett Dawson on World Percussion, Matt Frost on Keys and tons more surprise guests!). Every show I’ve played up there so far has been a blast; a really responsive audience and a ton of fun. Come join in!

Also want to give a shout out to AMI Radio for their tireless support of independent musicians. They had me on for an on-air interview / performance a few weeks ago and I had a lot of fun meeting them and chatting with such positive, music loving people. Please support them by checking out their website, podcasts and AM Radio broadcast when you’re on island. Listen to my interview here: (interview)

 

Featured on Internet Radio

Hello music-eaters. A west-coast podcast will be featuring my tune “Let’s Get Alone” today at 3pm PST. Tune in online here: Amber Show

My Contribution to the “What I Actually Do” Meme

1) Someone makes something amazing and funny.

2) Hundreds of people make rip offs that are progressively less funny.

3) Eventually everyone hates the meme, than someone makes an ironic, self referential version of the meme.

It’s the great circle of life on the internet.

FACEBOOK MEME SHARER – What I Think I Do…

Artist Profile in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s “The Ticket”

Sarasota’s premier newspaper periodically features locale musicians in their arts publication / website “The Ticket”, and they’ve featured yours-truly this week. Journalist Dawn Scire does a bang-on job describing my sound in all its permutations and combinations, and I might just have to steal some of her phrases when describing my music in the future. Rock on for supporting live, local music!

“Nor does his music fit into any common category: one minute he’s singer-songwriter smooth, the next breaking into rap-jazzy scats, skillfully co-merging genres within songs.” Herald-Tribune – Jan, 2012

Read the whole article at ticketsarasota.com

tUnE-yArDs!!!

AHHH! tUnE-yArDs!!! This album w h o k i l l is SO good. And WTF she has played with ?uestlove and Black Thought?!?! This tune is killer, click to watch her performing “Gangsta” with the Roots live on Jimmy Fallon. She is the lead singer of Sister Suvi as well, whose drummer Nico Dann you just might recognize from my 2008 release “[Reasonably] Honest”. Is it weird that right now I’m more excited to be 2 degrees from Merrill than I am 3 degrees from the Roots?

Stop SOPA – This is out of control

As a copyright holder myself, I fully understand the need and economic necessity of reducing piracy. The bill currently before congress referred to as “SOPA” is absolutely NOT the way to accomplish this, and would in fact charge me and anyone else who has ever posted footage of themselves singing a popular song online with A FELONY. Make no mistake, this bill is not about providing money due to the artists that create. This is about greed, and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet and Art has evolved.

http://americancensorship.org/

PS: If you visited my site BENHAMMONDMUSIC.COM you were greeted with a censorship pop-up, as a reminder that this bill would alter the internet in many unforeseen ways. (Screenshot below)

 

Top-Downloaded Song on MadeLoud.com

Excited to announce that my track “Worst Kind of Perfect” is one of the top downloaded songs on music website madeloud.com

I finished just a few songs below an artist named “Zan-X” performing what I can only imagine is a politically charged commentary on the Nixon administration and the resultant Watergate scandal

 

I made it on the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks!

Snapped this photo at one of my gigs, and I am very “honored” to announce that it has been “featured” on this site. “Enjoy!”

www.unnecessaryquotes.com

Great Tool for Cross-Browser Friendly Webdesigns: “NetRenderer”

In updating the website for JoJoe, a Montreal-based Reggae Artist, I was having some trouble with the site displaying improperly in Internet Explorer (on Windows which I don’t have access to). It looked fine on my mac, but the band said on their PC it was all messed up after I had experienced and thought I’d fixed an uploading error. A little googling brought me to Netrenderer, a really great tool that lets you select which version of IE you want to render a site in, feed it the URL, then view an auto-generated snapshot of the site. Really helpful to test your site if you’re designing on a Mac or Linux machine.

BTW: Jojoe has released a new album, and have some big shows coming up if you’re in the Montreal area or into reggae.

Ben Hammond on Jango Radio

Still not sure exactly how I feel about Jango – it’s an internet radio station, similar to Pandora (which I was lucky enough to be selected for with my first album “[Reasonably] Honest“) however unlike Pandora which has a rigorous selection process, Jango has Jango Airplay which is basically “pay-to-play” for indie artists to be mixed in with the popular major label artists that have similar styles.

I got 100 free plays from a promotion they were running, and have a few “fans” from those promo plays, but haven’t decided if this is a good use of my marketing budget. Any thoughts?

http://www.jango.com/music/Ben+Hammond