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Showing posts from March, 2024

Salsa, It's Not Just For Eating - A Musical Trip to Cuba

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    Surprisingly, salsa dip was created as early as 1571 which is long before this genre was created, although it does lend its name to the perfect representation of a genre. According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office's website, " The genre had roots in colonial Cuba and mid-20th-century New York. Then, in the late 1960s, as Latin music became ever more popular among New York audiences, Pacheco and his business partner selected the word “salsa” as the genre's convenient, memorable, marketable identifier. The name became part of a much larger strategy that transformed salsa into a national and then international phenomenon." Johnny Pacheco is the man and the musician that brilliantly came up with the phrasing for this genre. Pacheco was born in the Dominican Republic in 1935 and migrated with his family to the United States in 1946. Essentially salsa music is descended from both son  cubano and Afro-Cuban music. According to Masterclass.com, there are s

Innovations and Evolutions - The Demise of Digital Downloads

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Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember the rush you got when someone gifted you an iTunes gift card. The anxiety of picking out only a certain number of songs,  or do I buy the whole album? Do I buy one song and save the rest for later? The uncertainty of it all was riveting.  On April 28th, 2003, Apple launched their iTunes store. According to an article posted by the Apple website, customers were able to purchase and download music that they wanted to listen to for $0.99 per song. At this time the iTunes store featured over 200,000 songs from many of the major labels. The user could sample up to 30 seconds of a song prior to buying that song to make sure that they wanted to purchase it. Apple launched iTunes just 3 years after the first iPod was released.  While iTunes was not the only way to download music, many sites like Napster, LimeWire, and Kazaa were also extremely popular. These sites appealed to users because often times they had hard to find, unreleased,