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May
27
2009

Music Discovery and Community – a Sub-Semantic Connective Network

Category: community building,design & user experience,social media — jmacofearth @ 8:32 pm

[Sub-Semantic: my own word, meaning sub (below) semantic (meaning) music networks]

Update: Today I turned off my Blip.fm to Twitter connection. While I was enjoying the DJ aspect of Blip, I was also aware that the "value" of my Tweets were NOT in musical recommendations. So rather than flooding my twitter stream with blips I am now keeping Blip to itself and adding them to my FriendFeed stream rather than broadcasting them on Twitter.

There is a universal thread that is beginning to run through many of my networks. I call it Music Discovery, but it goes by the names of Blip.fm, Last.fm, Bebo, Pandora, Reverbnation (on Facebook) and many others. And what makes this network different from any others is the nature of the connection is MUSIC. I will cover each of these services in subsequent posts.

So unless you are in the music business, there is no ROI on participating in this game. But what it has given me, in terms of "discovery" over the last three years is amazing and I wanted to share a bit about how the services work. If you are not a music fanatic, then you might want to skip off to another post. But if you are interested in finding new songs, new bands, and exploring the non-business aspect of social media, then this could be fun.

For this first post I am going to share my newest favorite Blip.fm and the most recent blow-your-head-off discovery that I made using Blip "Again And Again – Bird And The Bee" http://ff.im/-38KTY

Here’s how that looks in my tweetstream. (not anymore, see update above)

And on Blip, if you are looking at the a playlist, it would look like this:

Or on the public timeline, it would look like this.

So imagine a Twitter timeline, that is just passing songs that people are promoting as virtual DJs. TweetJays perhaps.

So here’s a look at the public timeline, and the magic that is Blip.

It looks like Twitter doesn’t it? So the cool part is the little red "play" link will start the song immediately, no lag. So scrolling down the list, I can choose a familiar song, CSN’s "Teach Your Children" or I can click on a song/artist I’ve never heard of. And from this process alone, I have discovered the following bands/songs recently. And these are the ones that have floored me with their originality.

I might have heard OF them, or heard ONE of their hits, but these bands are now in my high rotation slot. [Okay, so here’s where the business comes in, Blip does make it easy to BUY the music, with handy links to Amazon and iTunes. And I highly recommend you buy them. But listening on Blip.fm is FREE FREE FREE, kinda like Radio.]

So here’s what a blip looks like as I am creating it:

And let me dissect the blip for you. Nada Surf – the band, "Always Love" the song title, @lucianan the person who bliped the song originally, I am REBLIPPING his selection and thus giving him credit (just like a ReTweet but a ReBlip). then I give a short snippet of the lyrics that are meaningful to me "to make a mountain of your life is just a choice" and finally, I am leaving @lucianan’s comment in what looks to be Portuguese. And when I hit the OK button, it puts my blip on the public timeline and it also blips the song to my Twitter stream. [I am thinking about this, because I usually control my Tweets pretty judiciously, and I am not sure about the “value” of putting all my musical blips out there, but I’m still thinking about this.]

I would like to hip you to a couple of bands I have been grooving out to, and longing to sound like, but probably won’t.

Silversun Pickups – Catch and Release
Nada Surf – The Voices
Ken Andrews – Alergic (an in the studio look on YouTube)
Band of Horses – Is There a Ghost (on YouTube)
Snow Patrol – Open Your Eyes (on YouTube)
Minus the Bear – Studio Promo (YouTube)
Future Clouds and Radar – The Epcot View (Robert Harrison was the primary song writer for Cotton Mather)
Porcupine Tree – Arriving Somewhere But Not Here
Sunny Day Real Estate – Television (an acoustic session on YouTube)

I think these bands and songs sort of typify the term "darker side of pop" that I use in conjunction with Buzzie. Cause I’m Pop and I’m Rock and I’m Americana and … And I want to ROCK darker!

@jmacofearth

permalink: http://bit.ly/blip-fm

You might be able to find most of these on my Blip.fm playlist.

Also of interest might be: