I spent some excellent quality time with many of my colleagues in the world music industry at a conference this past weekend, and one topic that came up a few times was whether people prefer Pandora Internet Radio or Last.fm. For me, there's no contest - I'm definitely a Last.fm girl. I think they've just got a much larger and better-organized library of world music. Some people seem to like Pandora better, though, generally claiming that the interface is nicer and that they think the "recommendations" are really solid. So what's your pick, and why? Leave a comment and defend your favorite!

It's a fairly well-known fact among Bob Marley's fans that he died of cancer, which began as skin cancer on his foot but later spread to his lungs and brain. What's lesser-known, though, is that death may have been preventable, but would have required an amputation, which Marley turned down. As a devout Rastafarian, Marley believed that the body is meant to be kept whole and that amputation is a sin. Additionally, some Rastafarians believe that physical immortality (staying alive in your actual body) is possible, and by acknowledging one's own death ensures that it'll happen soon. This decision led to a great deal of dissent within the Rastafarian community, as well as among non-Rastas worldwide, but what I think everyone can agree on is that Bob Marley's death left a huge void in the reggae community, and in the music community at large. Learn more about the death of this legend.

If you read this site regularly, you already know about my slightly unhealthy obsession with Manu Chao, but I haven't talked much about my deep, sincere, unabiding love for the sport of soccer (the civilized football, if you will). I was a player when I was younger; a goalie, in fact, best-known for my relative lack of skill at keeping the ball out of the net, which I made up for by being able to kick a ball a ridiculously long distance. Seriously.

Anyone who's a passing fan of soccer knows the name Diego Maradona. Despite being a notorious bad boy, he's inarguably one of the finest players ever to take the field. Therefore, I got pretty excited the other day when one of my Facebook friends posted this video of Manu Chao serenading Diego Maradona with his song "La Vida Tombola" (Listen/Download), which he recorded on his 2007 release, La Radiolina. The song is an homage to Maradona, in which Chao sings, "If I was Maradona, I would live like him... life is a jackpot." It's not actually Manu Chao's first song about Maradona; he recorded one called "Santa Maradona" with his now-defunct band Mano Negra.

So, I was too busy watching two of the coolest men alive effortlessly pulling off the roles of serenader/serenaded to really think about why such a thing might be happening, but was brought back down to earth when another friend messaged me and said simply, "What's the deal with this?" Indeed, it did seem a little strange, but some intrepid internet searching that required the use of my mediocre Spanish (which, like soccer, I was pretty good at when I was 14) led me to discover that it's a clip of footage from a documentary about Maradona. According to IMDB, the doc will be simply called Maradona, and it's set to be released in France in May, which means we might get a subtitled version in the States sometime before the end of the year. The best part? Most of the soundtrack was performed by Manu Chao. Basically, the sheer level of coolness exuded by the movie might make it unfit for most audiences, but I'm willing to give it a try.

According to Mr. Rupert Till, yes. Till, who is an expert in acoustics and music technology at a university in England, believes that Stonehenge was designed to have special acoustic properties, which amplified simple drum beats and other percussion into a trancelike music.

About 14 kazillion different theories about Stonehenge's original purpose have been floated throughout the academic world for years, and this one seems just as speculative as any of the others, but it is kind of cool to think about. I'm not 100% convinced that Neolithic peoples had particularly specialized knowledge of acoustics, since even in this day and age, experts can't get certain concert halls to sound right (how many times have they redesigned Avery Fisher Hall now?), so it seems a little bit unlikely, but I'll roll with it for the moment.

If Stonehenge had been an ancient rave venue, so to speak, what would the music have sounded like? Well, we know that building started on the monument around 5,000 years ago, though we're not exactly sure who built it. This places it in the Neolithic Age, and what artifacts tell us about the music of the Neolithic age is pretty much what you'd expect: a few simple flutes and a whole lotta drums. It's likely that singing and body percussion also played a big role, though of course we have no definite idea what the music sounded like overall. If it followed the global trend that still exists today among non-modernized cultures, it was probably highly participatory (everyone played some part), imitated sounds of nature (everything from bird whistles to heartbeats), and probably served multiple purposes, everything from worship to stress relief - just like music still does.

So what do you think? Could Stonehenge have been the site of a bunch of prehistoric Woodstocks? And is anyone else having a hard time keeping the Stonehenge sequence from This is Spinal Tap out of their head any time the words "music" and "Stonehenge" come up in the same sentence?

Stonehenge Image (c) Grant Faint/Getty Images