Hello and welcome to Show and Tell, a site that serves as sort of an orphanage for thrift store music and album cover art.

Highly browsable. Set aside some time.

show and tell home

All Music Guide begins her bio with:

Vocalist Madeleine Peyroux can best be thought of as a Billie Holiday for the 1990s.

From the promo on her web site:

The album "Careless Love" seamlessly weaves strands of acoustic blues, country ballads, torch songs and pop into a vibrant fabric that is both classically vintage and thoroughly up to date.

AMG wraps up its bio of Peyroux with this:

However she is marketed, blues, jazz or "roots music," look for more great things to come to this young and promising 20-something vocalist, guitarist and songwriter.

Madeleine Peyroux

I do think I understand marketing and public relations, and I am astounded by the naivete of young people — black and white — who actually buy the canned rebelliousness not just of rap music but of most pop music.

It's all such an obvious con game. We hear so much about how kids today are cynical, skeptical, media-savvy and so forth. But if they're buying this hooey, they're idiots.

Want to be a real rebel? Read a book.

Kanye West is a Fake

Sales of music via the internet and mobile phones proliferated and spread across the world in 2005, generating sales of US$1.1 billion for record companies - up from US$380 million the previous year -- and promising further significant growth in the coming year.

The findings are released today in IFPI's Digital Music Report 2006, a comprehensive review of the development of the digital music market internationally.

Music fans downloaded 420 million single tracks from the internet last year - twenty times more than two years earlier - while the volume of music licensed by record companies doubled to over 2 million songs. Digital music now accounts for about 6% of record companies' revenues, up from practically zero two years ago.

What's Your Listening Style? [PDF]

The Orchard is seeking to make money by purchasing music from small independent and foreign labels, and then distributing it to digital music services. In most music stores, CD's of, say, Chinese or Kenyan pop music would be consigned to the world-music bin as a good will gesture. But the economics of online stores is changing the financial calculations of the music business, making it profitable to sell a relatively small number of copies of a song, as long as a compact disc is not manufactured and distributed.

Buying Music From Anywhere and Selling It for Play on the Internet

This has everything..
It's multi-cultural.
It's campy.
It's creepy.
It has a singing robot,
and it's about pi.

I'm re-recommending the original URL that appeared here, but you should view the higher-quality QuickTime 7 version instead.

Keith Schofield / Pi

If there was a better way to go then it would find me
I can't help it the road just rolls out behind me
Be kind to me or treat me mean
I'll make the most of it I'm an extraordinary machine

This song reminds me of one of Nellie McKay's jazz cabaret tunes, like the lyrics of Won't You Please Be Nice [mp3] and the tune of Respectable [mp3]:

If you would sit
Oh so close to me
That would be nice
Like it's supposed to be
If you don't I'll slit your throat
So won't you please be nice

Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine

Ever since we started the Music Genome Project, our friends would ask:

Can you help me discover more music that I'll like?

Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.

We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.

This is very cool. It already integrates Amazon and iTunes. It needs an open API to link in other sources, although I doubt they'll do that, because they're probably banking on the referral fees from Apple and Amazon.

If you like Pandora, you should also check out GNOD and its music map.

Pandora

If you're looking for rare, classic, vintage Blues, Jazz, Boogie-woogie, Gospel and Country music then you have come to the right place. Many call it the place.

A friend turned me on to this company. The volume of rare product on offer here is just amazing.

Document Records: Vintage Blues, Jazz and Afro American music

Found via Cafe LA; album review by Rhapsody:

This extensive collection of songs featuring the pioneering female guitarist and blues singer is highlighted by Memphis Minnie's distinctive guitar style and contralto vocals. Minnie sings about committing murder with enough conviction to make you wonder if she wasn't the biggest, baddest bad ass in Chicago in the 1940s.

This is amazing stuff. Check out "When The Levee Breaks" (iTMS URL, RealAudio clip).

Memphis Minnie: Queen of the Blues