Sunday 15 June 2014

Pony music on Spotify? You'd better believe it!

If you have a Spotify account, then you might just be surprised at how much pony music is available through that service. It's not always easy to find stuff on Spotify if you don't know what you're looking for, though, so in this post I'll take a look at some of what's out there. As you'd expect from this blog, this is done with a UK focus, so please don't be too upset if some of these tracks aren't available worldwide! For simplicity's sake, I'm using HTTP links throughout, rather than Spotify URIs, despite the iffiness of the Spotify web player.

First up, we have official show music! That's right: the first of the two officially released albums of (sometimes extended) songs from the show itself is available via Spotify. Songs of Friendship and Magic contains the likes of "Winter Wrap Up", "The Smile Song" and "This Day Aria". The more recent second album, Songs of Ponyville, is unfortunately not available (yet?) and it's a shame that the one we do get lacks the second part of "Art of the Dress", but let's not look a gift horse in the mouth, as Twilight once said.

After that, we're on to brony-produced music. As far as I can tell, only a small minority of fandom musicians are featured on Spotify, but there's some nice stuff if you dig around for it. Perhaps the most impressive artist to be found here is Aviators: you can listen to the Reflections of a Dream, Aeterno, From All Sides and Mirrors albums, the Acoustic EP and the Constellations and Red singles. Still only a portion of Aviators' substantial output, but there are some real gems here: "Open Your Eyes", "Someone Like Me" and "Heroes", for example.

Another big-name musician who has some stuff on Spotify is The Living Tombstone. Not all that much, but the Tombstone Remixes album and Manehattan EP are there. The "Nightmare Night" remix is probably the best known track here. On a very different stylistic note, there's Garrison Ulrich's Small Horses and Other Stuff folk-rock album, which despite the second part of its name is largely made up of pony-themed guitar ballads. I'm fond of "Time is an Adventure", which features Feather (yes, that Feather) and the 2014 remix of Ulrich's older "Wings".

There's not a great deal left (that I've found!) from really popular artists, but Replacer does have Cerulean Blue – sadly, just that one song. There are some nice orchestral covers by Walt Ribeiro of a few tunes: the show theme, "Smile, Smile, Smile" and two fandom tracks: "Rainbow Factory" and "Discord". The latter two really are pretty impressive. Finally, for this post at least, there's a selection from 60s-style band The Shake Ups: the In Ponyville: Mane Event album and a few tracks from the confusingly similarly titled In Ponyville.

I'd better stop here, before this post becomes horribly long. But please do let me know in the comments if you've discovered any other pony music lurking around on Spotify!

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