We need a social revolution where Music is concerned – after having scoured the Net, amidst developers’ yard shifts, I have found with the help of a friend, Nicolas Goueset who introduced me to Blip.fm a few days ago, other promising sites for musicians and DJs alike. I am seriously contented with Last.fm and if they’d want to stay the leader of the metronome, some changes will have to be made.
Major revamp!
After playing and testing the available ‘tunes’ on Blip, I thought yeah … it would be a schmancy social site to sign-up for an account. Not long after I realised that as long as a title is in-store on a server, you will get to hear it streamed. I also found out that the probability of music not being online could jeopardize labels to be pushed to the masses. What I like about Blip.fm is that it is almost similar to both Twitter, and Plurk – especially in the case where you’d earn your karma points {aka Props} by tipping it to similar DJs for playing a tune just about to pop out of your cranium. You can also interact with fans {aka listeners} who share the same music taste and discover each other’s chords so to speak.
There must be a way to get labels fed to the masses – just deal with the Public & Business Relations!
Work with existing Social Music Networks {SMNs}, and grant them a license to stream these on commission perhaps – when a fan streams a playlist, both producers and SMNs profit. When a fan clicks on ‘Buy Music’ all parties should be contented. A playlist or a series of playlists should be able to be combined, and ‘purchased’ making both DJs, SMNs and Producers social profit! You can make profits selling playlists too! Copyright is another thing – it has nothing to do with a fan making money out of it – if one must combat piracy, it should start with the Business & Marketing Development Department!
The moment you have the promotion department going one way and the marketing department the other, you’re fucked ~ Larry Stessell, Mercury Records
It is not that difficult to promote the tunes, and get fans ravving about the latest Who’s Who in the industry. Maestro is another site to look into – the same thing can be said about creating your playlist – you download a plugin {ensure that your system is equipped!} and have your hard drive scanned for all the greatest hits – the tags will then be loaded onto your dashboard, and once you’ve played it, its stored even if you’re not connected to your desktop – Not a likely thing to do the first time around since the plugin hoards mega-resources, even while playlists are being streamed.
You’ve gotta be business savvy really, or else you get the piss taken out of you. ~ Melanie B, Spice Girls
Jiwa Music is in beta, and it allows Musicians to upload original content produced by them – it also allows users to scour the database for tracks and videos, adding it to their playlist and sharing it with friends. Since its still in beta, you’re not likely to find tunes the likes of Nancy Wilson, Astrud Gilberto or even Chopin.
MusicStrands uses statistical machine learning, collaborative filtering, complex network-based analysis, to provide music recommendations based exclusively on the listening behavior of individuals and social networks. They build services that enable users to discover new things, based on their online, offline and mobile activities. Almost similar to Pandora, MusicStrands is something I may consider tinkering later.
If Producers are fearful of having their media ripped, then convert these into something which is unreadable if ripped on a client’s desktop or player – maybe someting similar to what Radio Blog Club is doing – it really isn’t difficult to combat piracy you know… there is such a thing as hiring application developers that will contain media and make them unreadable but streamable.
Nothing is impossible where Music is concerned.
Whilst Maestro is definitely out for me – I’d reckon with the not so many excellent social Music networks, I’d still churn out music for friends, and fans on Last.fm…and Blip. Last.fm is a good site with major room for revamp.
Other interesting sites to consider…
- Free music zilla, the first tool specialized for social music downloading, enables you download free music from Imeem, Last.fm, Pandora, Myspace, eSnips, Mog, iJigg, Radio.blog.club and almost all social music services.
- Discover new music with the Musiclovr portal. Completely 100% user driven, so you avoid all the industry hype and discover the music your peers recommend. Purchase individual mp3s or full albums, ringtones, view photos and video, or keep up with the latest news and blog postings.
- MusicStation transforms the phone giving the consumer all the playing functionality and user experience of a standard MP3 player – along with all the browse, search, celebrity playlist features of a desktop program – plus community features and personalized news and views.
- Mashup with youtube video for chosen tracklist, wikipedia and Amazon.
- MusicIP’s unique music matching technology defines relationships between sets of music based on acoustic traits and characteristics. With the goal to know about all the music in the world, MusicIP creates products and services to increase listener enjoyment and artist recognition through a one-of-a-kind music discovery experience.
- iLike offers musicians and labels a Universal Artist Dashboard™ from which to reach fans and manage their presence across multiple channels: Facebook, Orkut, hi5, Bebo, iLike.com, Ask.com, iLike Sidebar plugins for iTunes and Windows Media Player, and iLike’s iPhone application.
- Radio Blog is an environment designed for artists {and their producers} so they can directly benefit from their creations and promote their works
Really!
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