Music is an emotional experience. Raving about the flutter of John Coltrane’s saxophone reed is like praising the paintbrush strokes on the Mona Lisa – even if you have such unusual powers of musical analysis, it doesn’t really capture the essence of the work. As Steve Martin eloquently put it, “talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”
You know the best way to describe music? Don’t. Just give them a copy and let them make their own mind up. This is becoming steadily easier, thanks to advancing technology. Gone are the days of making a tape; just burn them a CD, email them an Mp3 or even just tell them the title and let them find it on a filesharing network. Okay, so there’s the small issue of copyright law, but that seems quite a distant problem compared to that of being able to share your emotion.
Despite the growing ease of sharing music, it’s still quite hard to find which friends share your musical taste, because everyone is so different. Effective music recommendation involves encountering someone who enjoys at least some subset of your musical tastes, remembering what they like, and then remembering to tell them whenever you encounter something they might like. It’s quite a difficult cognitive challenge, and unless you do it regularly, you’re unlikely to do it very effectively.
Online services that assist this process are great, but there has to be something to do with that information in order to make it useful. Like, for example, being able to hear tracks that these people like, but you haven’t heard. Guess what? That’s called collaborative filtering, and that’s exactly how most recommendation services services work, like Last.fm‘s Recommendation Radio.
Online “social networking” is the flavour of the day. Email, IM, blogs and social networking tools (like the ubiquitous MySpace) are becoming very popular, because they support and extend existing social networks. But the social network for music is ineffectual due to the communication barriers outlined above, and as such, a social networking tool for music deserves to be as sucessful as an architecural dance society.
Jon,
Great site. I love the simplicity of presentation in the WordPress world. It just looks clean and elegant.
I think you’re right about social networking not being the ideal platform for music discovery – but discovery is such a small part of the ongoing relationship between artist and consumer. What MySpace does is open up both vertical (artist to consumer / consumer to artist) and horizontal (consumer to consumer / artist to artist) channels of communication.
Worrying unduly about the process of discovery to the point that you discount a technology on that basis is like being concerned about the one-off sale to the detriment of the ongoing customer relationship.
MySpace is a necessary component of a whole range of internet promotional strategies. Relying on it as the only way people can find out about you would be commercial suicide – but not making use of it in your palette of online activities would make no sense at all. There are tens of millions of people on MySpace. There has to be some advantage to pitching a tent there.
My biggest problem with it is that so few people take the time and effort to make it look professional. You’re never going to get it looking like a real website (Worst. User. Interface. Ever.) – but it should be legible and reflect your brand accurately – and it should drive traffic to your real website.
Look forward to catching up with you next week.
Cheers,
Dubber
Steve Martin is just plain wrong. Or a spoilsport. Dancing about architecture sounds like fun. You should see me do the Tower Block.