Plugged!: The iTunes Weekly Rewind

Music is a wonderful thing, but let's be honest: there's also much garbage to sift through before you get to the good stuff. While not talking to all musical tastes, Apple's own iTunes Essentials staff want to tell you that there's actually quite a bit of music that direly needs a little loving and a little listening. This is where the dead singles and overlooked album tracks come to life; this is The iTunes Weekly Rewind.

With 82 episodes under its belt, it's obvious that the several people running the show have a lot of musical knowledge under their belts, and that's because the episodes tend to lean more on older artists than they really do new ones. I mean, yes, they do cover a lot of new artists, but they constantly add older ones into the mix- and sometimes in just one unprecedented sentence- and you can really hear just how passionate they want you to listen to this/these artist(s), and how you'll definitely come to appreciate a lot of the music being featured.

The unfortunate thing is that despite several months of listening in on the conversation, I still can't quite remember much of the names of the podcasters, and that's a bit of a shame. It's not that their talk isn't interesting, hell, far from it, but it's just that I can't really get myself to remember their names, except for the sole female voice that is Tanyer Tomas (sorry if I butchered the spelling) who usually starts and ends the show.

No matter what music you like though, the team always talks about various artists, happenings and topics that let them really analyze the musical identities and history that comes with each. They don't really take a definitive stance on anything (which feigns a feeling of neutrality), and you'll be surprised at just how well their Genius feature works (why can't I get my Genius feature to work as good as theirs?!) and that's because in every episode they'll also process a certain song by a certain artist through iTunes' Genius feature and talk about the resulting playlist.

Music fans will find it easy to geek out with these clearly passionate people, and the potential for discovering a new artist or an old, overlooked song is always absolute.

I highly recommend listening to this 30-40 minute podcast, because every episode manages to pack a lot of information and music samples in a coherent package. Heck, this is the podcast that had me convinced that Lady Gaga is a legitimate artist, so you'll be surprised at some of the things they'll say that you'll somehow agree to.

Here's the iTunes link for the podcast. [Link]