One thing leads to another and, when we saw Barb Jungr play just before Christmas, I got a copy of her Every Grain of Sand album of Bob Dylan covers, which triggered another bout of my recurrent mania for these cover versions. I went through all my old covers albums again, ripped my favourite versions […]
Playlists
Research on playlists and sharing as means of recommending music
The transition to online music distribution is occurring at the same time that consumers have an exploding number of sources of information about music, from established media sources to Internet-connected friends and strangers. As a result, getting the word out about new material, new bands or back catalogs is made more difficult for music marketers […]
MusicStrands: playlist sharing and music discovery
Last week MusicStrands launched a major upgrade that extends its scope by adding new ways to tag, discuss, and discover music — see the overview of the new features. This is moving in the direction of the MySpace music community — technically I think it’s a step ahead of MySpace, but clearly lacks the latter’s […]
Does music have a genome?
Alongside the Last.FM model of personalised online radio (which I covered at some length and have cited in several other posts), Pandora provides an alternative based on different technology and classifications: We take your input (artists, songs) and feedback (“I like this”, “I don’t like this”) and use the Music Genome Project™ to create stations […]
Finding and auditioning music online
If online music services are really going to take off, they need to demonstrate that they work, and work well. That means a seamless of experience of discovering tracks, previewing or ‘auditioning’ them, and committing either to buying them (in the à la carte, iTunes-style model) or downloading them ‘to go’ (in the subscription model […]
Bigmouth Strikes Again — Five Eight article
My article on word-of-mouth recommendations among music fans and playlist sharing is the cover feature in the August issue of Five Eight music business magazine. Here’s the introduction (written by Five Eight editor, Eamonn Forde): Word of mouth is a term passed around the marketing playground everyday. But in a culture where the marketplace is […]
Last word (for now) on playlist sharing
Having initially reviewed four playlist sharing services, three providers of further services have let me know of what they’re doing in this area. I’ve already posted addenda on FIQL and Mixmatcher. Here are some comments on the GoFish playlist service, and a consolidated comparison table.
Mixmatcher playlist sharing service
After my original review of playlist sharing services, and FIQL addendum, I’ve been contacted again, this time from Ben of Mixmatcher. So here’s a quick canter through a review, based on my experience of setting up the same-old, same-old playlist using Mixmatcher.
FIQL: a further playlist service
Following my review of playlist sharing services, Mike Wu of FIQL.com got in touch to point me to his site. Mike writes, FIQL.com is also a playlist sharing site and we have close to 2,000 community contributed playlists divided up by genre, mood and occasion. Our playlists are hooked up to itunes, msn music and […]
Playlist sharing services: a comparative review
Since my series of postings about different playlist sharing experiments, Wired has picked up on the theme with a feature on the playlist phenomenon a few days ago. This focuses on the social and community potential of sharing playlists, though, in my opinion, it’s important not to get carried away with the everyone-a-DJ concept: if […]