I'm back!!! Oh, and DJ ODP too

First, let me apologize to my legions of readers (-ahem!-) for my long time away.  If you follow my other blog The Relocation Chronicles, you would know that I have recently moved from Washington, DC to Berlin, Germany.  Unfortunately, with a move across the world comes several months of winding the old life down, shipping everything overseas, and then getting the new life started.

But this move to the heart of European music is to both our benefit.  I now have more ready access to a whole world of music that was previously more difficult to discover (not to prey on old stereotypes, but Americans are notoriously suspicious of listening to languages that they do not understand).  If you're one of my army of readers (-ahem!-), you now get to discover this music through my ears.

Along those lines, yesterday I participated in a business startup event called Uncubed.  To be honest, not being a developer or a designer, and not being 25, I found the event a little disheartening - or at least I found listening to some the speakers a little disheartening.  I am sure that there is a place in the Berlin startup mix for a mid-career professional with almost 20 years of strategic management experience - but little hands-on development experience - in a successful American consulting firm to bring to the table.  But the event was not really designed around my needs.

That having been said, I had some incredibly interesting and productive conversations with a number of interesting young companies, and one interesting and somewhat more seasoned company that is on the cusp of being massive.

In the growing Berlin startup scene, SoundCloud is seen as the gold standard.  Started in 2007 by a Swedish sound designer and a Swedish artist as a platform through which they could share audio, SoundCloud has grown into a social media platform through which artists, musicians, writers, comedians, teachers, and anybody else who deals in the audio medium can share their "sounds" with fellow artists and increasingly consumers around the world.

I am not an artist, but I am a consumer with few rivals.  With a low cost for entry and a global footprint, SoundCloud is a magnet for musicians who want to reach beyond the few dozen listeners who might go to a show, or the few hundred who might hear of them through community word of mouth.  For somebody like me, who lives to uncover talented musicians who bring their own languages into the mix, the chance to speak in person with the people who bring a new level of ease of access to the process was a dream come true.

So, with that unsolicited plug out of the way, what was I able to use SoundCloud to bring to you today?  Well, over the years I've become something of a closet fan of reggaeton.  Called "Latin reggae" by some, reggaeton seamlessly blends reggae, hip hop, and Latin rhythms and lyrics.  And today's song is DJ ODP with his track Mi Vida No Va Cambiar.  Born in Guatemala, DJ ODP moved to the United States as a youth, and he has been spinning discs around the world for the past 10 years.  I dare you to listen to this track and stay in your seat.