This Week's Free Downloads (3/10/10)

Everyone loves free stuff. Check out these amazing free goodies that we know you'll be sure to love! NOTE: These free offers don't last forever. Get them while they last!

Single of the Week

Kidz In The Hall: Jukebox

 

In the mid-2000s, alternative hip-hop duo Kidz in the Hall became the new face for the revamped Rawkus Records, the underground rap powerhouse responsible for introducing groundbreaking acts like Mos Def and Talib Kweli before its operations were temporarily closed in 2004. Naledge's intelligence, imagery, and lyricism combined with the progressive and often jazz-inflected sounds of DJ/producer Double O easily recall the early-'90s aesthetic of hip-hop groups such as Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth, Gang Starr, or Souls of Mischief. A native of Chicago, Naledge (born Jabari Evans) was always the creative and lyrical type of guy, writing poetry and short stories since he was 13, but the New Jersey-bred Double O (born Michael Aguilar) always had been a techie, first DJing in the ninth grade and then composing beats in college. They first met each other at their alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. After witnessing Naledge's rhyme skills at a talent show during his recruiter's visit, impressed audience members pointed him toward the talented DJ. Over the years, the two Ivy Leaguers worked together and became good friends. Once Naledge graduated, he again hooked up with Double O, who had relocated to Los Angeles as an engineer for Sony Studios, and decided to form professionally as Kidz in the Hall. Naledge was already signed as a solo act to the reborn Rawkus and simply brought the Kidz in the Hall duo over to the label. The amount of (mostly Internet) press coverage greatly increased after prolific producer Just Blaze, a fellow techie, friend, and mentor of Double O, co-signed the group's efforts. Naledge and Double O heavily promoted themselves through the Internet and released several mixtapes to build up anticipation for their favorably received Rawkus debut, School Was My Hustle, in October 2006.

Discovery Download

Iration: Falling

Jets Overhead provide their debut self-titled EP and their first album, Bridges, for free download on their website as it is their view that in the current day and age, with pirating and illegal peer to peer (P2P) networks for downloading music free of charge, it is easier to provide the music in a free form themselves (though the option is given to buy the album at the regular price or make a voluntary donation). They appear to be one of the first bands to have addressed the difficulties of modern day music and what they call the "digital revolution", employing the voluntary purchase and download model a year and a half before the British rock group Radiohead more famously did it in October 2007 with their album In Rainbows.

After discovering that their most recent album, No Nations, had leaked onto certain file-sharing websites, lead singer Adam Kittredge responded in a positive way, saying, “We aren’t that concerned about it, because at our level, it’s kind of actually flattering to think that people think it’s worthwhile to so-called ‘steal’ our record before it’s released. It really doesn’t  matter to us at this level of the game and maybe it won’t ever – maybe it shouldn’t.”

The band has not repeated its original voluntary purchase model for the 2009 release of No Nations. However elements of the album have been made available through the band's website under a Creative Commons license. 

Melanie Fiona Hallim (born July 4, 1983) is a Canadian R&B singer-songwriter from Toronto, Ontario. She was born to Guyanese immigrant parents (mixed with black, Indian, and Portuguese ethnicities) and grew up in the inner city of Toronto. Living in a music filled household, Fiona says she always knew music was her passion. Her father was a guitarist in a band and would allow her to sit on the stage when she was younger as he practiced, and remembers her mother playing music at home; everything from The Ronettes to Whitney Houston.

Fiona was featured on Reggae Gold 2008 with the Supa Dups-produced "Somebody Come Get Me". Her debut album The Bridge was released in the summer of 2009. She worked on the album with Future Cut, Vada Nobles,Stereotypes, J. Phoenix, Peter Wade and Salaam Remi. The debut single "Give It to Me Right" was released to radio stations on February 28, 2009, and peaked at #20 on Billboard's Canadian Hot 100 and #41 on the UK Singles Chart. The second single, "It Kills Me", became her breakout song on the Billboard Hot 100 where it cracked the Top 50, along with hitting #1 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. The song earned Fiona a Grammy Award nomination forBest Female R&B Vocal Performance. The Bridge also earned her a NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding New Artist. 

Music Video of the Week
Melanie Fiona: It Kills Me

View video on Youtube.

Free TV Shows:
Parenthood: Pilot

View video on Youtube.

Real Housewives of NYC

View video on Youtube.

First Love, Second Chance: Chris & Pam

View video on Youtube.

We're Making A Few Updates!

As you've probably noticed, you "Featured Content" photo slideshow has started doing some weird things. Bear with us socialites, we'll have it all fixed up in no time. While we're performing these updates, please feel free to browse all of our latest posts. Also, let us know what you think of our featured artist Vita Chambers!

Have You Seen Our Meebo Bar?

A few days ago we released a fun little feature we hope you'll fall in love with.

It’s the new Meebo toolbar. The toolbar lives at the very bottom of your screen, fixed to the bottom of the browser window. You should see it the next time you visit Aurora Nights.

The Meebo Bar makes it easy for you to:

• Share an article with your friends by email, Facebook, Twitter or Yahoo.
• Shortcut over to see Our Latest Contests and participate in the Aurora Nights Fan Page over on Facebook.
• You can chat! You can login to your Facebook Chat, Meebo chat, Google Chat, AIM, or any other instant messenger you use. So you can chat with your friends and coworkers and fellow lensmasters without leaving Squidoo. Imagine working on lenses together this way, getting real time, instant feedback from your friends… Just a thought.
• You can also see real time notes and mini-updates, from Aurora Nights to you, right on the Meebo Bar.

Meebo's Share Dock pops out when you drag a piece of content on an enabled site.

Next, a few more logistics and details to know:

• No, the Meebo chatbar won’t slow down loading of your pages one bit. It won’t affect performance at all. Just so you know.
• Our friends over at Meebo tell us the chatbar really increases page views… meaning, the number of people who see and share your articles. That’s never a bad thing!
• Links clicked open in new tabs.
• If you don’t feel like using the Meebo Bar, you can minimize it easily.
• Meebo will run popular ads in the toolbar from time to time. They’ll be non-invasive and easy to close, and will always contain high-quality sponsored content.

We’re adding this feature as part of a trial period right now, so we’d love to hear what you think, and how you use the Meebo Bar. Giants have already tested this out for us, but if you see any bugs, please let us know by clicking on our Feedback Tab.

American Idol Strips Contestants of Social Media Accounts

This year American Idol made headlines for pushing out individual Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace accounts for each of its 24 finalists. However, the show made a drastic change in strategy last night by consolidating all of them under the AI9Contestants username across sites.

Twitter followers of each of the individual contestants were sent the following message, “Thanks so much for following me! All my updates from now on will be on our Official Ai9 Twitter Page, please follow me there @AI9Contestants.” Similar messages were posted to Facebook and MySpace as well.

The contestants individual social media identities were stripped by the show without rhyme or reason, but The Wall Street Journal and USA Today speculate that the move was likely made because of the propensity of social media site follower counts to reveal early favorites, influence voting and possibly remove the veil of the mystery that clouds American Idol’s typically stealth results.

The logic is sound — a contestant with more Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and MySpace friends is likely to get more votes and thus would have a higher chance of winning the competition. But in making the decision,American Idol has also made it impossible for contestants to develop that now all-important connection with their fan base, which is becoming crucial to the business side of the industry.

We should also note that while Idol’s consolidation efforts may be designed to maintain the mystery of the show’s outcome, there’s no stopping the rest us from turning to social media analytics providers to try and predict the winners and losers based on overall buzz and sentiment breakdown. In fact, we know that Philip Kaplan of Blippy has plans to do just that, indicating that he may try to ruin American Idol with a custom program that will look at who people say they’re voting for in social media channels.

New Movies: Alice In Wonderland & Brooklyn's Finest

Alice in Wonderland is a 2010 fantasy adventure film directed by Tim Burton, written by Linda Woolverton, and stars Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Michael Sheen and Stephen Fry. It is an extension of the Lewis Carroll novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. The film uses a technique of combining live action and animation. In the film, Alice is now 19 years old and accidentally returns to Underland, a place she previously visited 12 years ago. She is told that she is the only one that can slay the Jabberwock, a dragon controlled by the Red Queen. Burton said the original Wonderland story was always about a girl wandering around from one character to another and he never felt a connection emotionally, so he wanted to make it feel more like a story than a series of events. He doesn't see this as a sequel to previous films or a re-imagining. It premiered in London at the Odeon Leicester Square on February 25, 2010. It will be released in Australia on March 4, 2010 and the United States and the United Kingdom on March 5, 2010 through Walt Disney Pictures in 3-D and IMAX 3-D, as well as in regular theaters.

The story revolves around three New York police officers over one week. Eddie is a patrolman played by Richard Gere who only has 7 days left before he can pull the pin and retire. Eddie has seen it all, and he has become so disenchanted with life that he must find some reason each day not to blow his own brains out. Undercover cop Tango played by Don Cheadle has been on the streets too long, causing him to protect Caz (Wesley Snipes) the drug kingpin target he is out to catch. Sal (Ethan Hawke) is a narcotics cop who is under tremendous pressure to provide a healthy home for his pregnant wife and two children. This stress from home and the temptation of all that drug money at his job is causing him to jump back and forth from being a good cop to a bad cop. In the end, all three police officers will eventually come together.

Sony's PlayStation 2 Celebrates 10 Years!

Dreamcast? GameCube? Xbox? They're cute and endearing to look back on now, because they really never stood a chance. Sony practically redefined what it meant to be dominant in a console generation with the PlayStation 2, which was launched on March 4, 2000 in Japan (the US got it that October), went on to sell over 140 million units, and is still going strong. It's strange to think that for what many people was their first DVD player turned out to be powerful enough to bring us the cinematic experiences ofShadow of the Colossus, God of War II and Final Fantasy XII, and enough of a kicker to make it into the latest round of Madden releases. Of course, its foray into online gaming took a second fiddle to Microsoft's Xbox, and many of Sony's high-minded, living room-invasion promises of the console (remember that FireWire port? The hard drive slot?) never really panned out. Still, we'd say it's been a pretty good 10 years for this thing. Feeling extra-nostalgic? Check out Sony's own timeline of PlayStation it pumped out for the 15 year anniversary of the brand last year. Brings a tear to our eye every time.

Porsche 918 Spyder Concept Is the Most Beautiful Hybrid We've Ever Seen!

Um, we're sure there's something sensible to be said about this Porsche concept, but we're not altogether capable of coherent expression at present. We want to own one of these so badly, we don't even care if it has an engine. And boy does the 918 Spyder have an engine. A 3.4-liter V8 petrol burner is combined with electric motors to put out 500bhp, while featuring the mind-altering acceleration to go from a standing start to 62mph in just 3.2 seconds. Topping out at 198mph and offering a very respectable 78mpg fuel economy, this is pretty much the stuff dreams are made, which is quite naturally why you shouldn't expect to see it in any purchasable form any time soon. If you do care to see more of it, however, you can do so at the Geneva Motor Show this year or just past the break, the choice is yours.

Featured Artist! Vita Chambers (Young Money)

In our time, don’t you find that the most exciting events, personalities and talents are the ones that prove we’ve all grown past our boundaries and borders and categories? Age? Just a number, in sports, music, cinema, even business, sometimes. Nationality? Who doesn’t dream of being a citizen of the world? Musical genres? Good music is good music, old or new. Race? The. Most. Yesterday. category of them all.

Vita, the 15-year-old singer from Barbados, is living proof, in her personal history and in her music, that the future of pop is going to unfold in a world without boundaries and limitations.

Fittingly, she plotted her own discovery right here on the borderless World Wide Web, by posting a video and three audio streams of songs she co-wrote and recorded in Barbados. She traveled to New York to sign and record her album with SRP Records, which also discovered the Bajan heroines Rihanna and Shontelle, and developed them as international stars.

Following in their footsteps, she’s confident in the ability of her voice and her music to carry her far in the world. But know this before you know anything: Vita’s voice will be her voice. Big, powerful, honest, smart, observant, distinct, original.

With that voice, Vita has now scored a worldwide recording deal with SRP/Universal Motown through Universal Motown President Sylvia Rhone, who signed such landmark female acts as En Vogue and Brandy to their first major-label contracts. Vita’s first single, “Like Boom,” will hit radio in August, with a full-length debut album scheduled for release in fall 2009. She’’ll be shooting her first video later this month and will then hit the road for an extended radio promo tour both in the U.S. and overseas.

“My parents say I sang right out of the womb,” Vita says, “but I had my first voice lessons about four years ago – operatic training, the first year. I had such a big range of music that I liked, that I just wanted to sing, no matter what the genre was. The lessons gave me confidence — the ability to hear myself, me, and not copy someone else’s style.”

Vita’s musical and career horizon now is as broad as the ocean horizon she views while surfing, scuba diving and walking the beach with her four beloved dogs at home in St. Philip Parish, on the Atlantic coast of Barbados. She carries with her a family background from three continents and the Caribbean (her father is a British commercial pilot and her mother a dentist, of Nigerian and Barbadian heritage) and a limitless fascination for every form of music that becomes evident whenever she discusses her loves in music — and becomes especially obvious when she sings.

Inspired, like so many young talents, by her parents’ record collection, Vita, born Vita Chambers in Canada, was raised in Barbados on both her dad’s rock and roll music and her mom’s R&B, and became an avid YouTube watcher, with the result that Andrea Bocelli, Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury, Tina Turner, Imogen Heap, Coldplay, and Pink are as much her musical and vocal heroes as Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and Whitney Houston. She now laughs off a school choir solo at age 10 that she recalls as a disaster, but it was after singing lead for a band at a school talent show just last year, choosing her friends’ pop-rock favorites like “So What,” “Bleeding Love” and “Hot ‘N’ Cold,” that she resolved to pursue pop music as her profession.

Finding a sympathetic producer to make music to anchor a webpage, co-writing her own songs to express her interest in both rock and electronic music, and delighted by her first creative interactions with musicians, Vita, an obvious self-starter, was nonetheless thunderstruck when in just a couple of months, the Internet buzz around her posted video and songs resulted in a call from SRP Records.

Now mid-way through recording her first album, she voices satisfaction that her danceable yet gutsy pop-rock sound and her visuals are both truthful to her. “The songs are pop, but also with an element of rock. The lyrics are young, everything that goes through a teenager’s mind. I’d like my look to have a vintage and contemporary feel, something familiar, but cool and edgy and new, too. Wherever it goes, it’s got to be honest. I have a lot of female friends, and some have self-confidence issues, so always being true to yourself and comfortable in your skin is something I’m always concerned with.”

Given Vita’s big-picture view of music, it’s somehow not surprising when she also mentions an interest in pediatric neurosurgery: “It’s so fascinating, because there’s so much we don’t know about the brain. And we only use a percentage of it: people who use just 2% more of its capacity are the absolute geniuses.” Here, then, is a girl who wants to get into your head, and expand your mind. Come along quietly. You’ll enjoy the ride. It’s likely to take you around the world — everywhere.