paulbailey.us

an experiment in narrowcasting and curation

as some of you may know i have been kicking around the idea of creating a new website to feature music from our community (independent DIY art music). my original idea centered around the observations of how various website in the community functioned.

originally there was Sequenza 21 which like a new music magazine functioned as good watercooler to discuss whatever articles and music being promoted. then there was Net New Music; which has been very interesting  community fourm/clubhouse (on most days) for the new music community. both of these sites have specific purposes, but neither functions well as a music publishing and aggregation platform. after thinking about this quite a bit and surveying many of the platforms available and as an experiment i decided to try and create a website that focuses on curating and aggregating this music ourselves

the big idea

the “big idea” is is as simple as this; let the new music community aggregate itself. i.e. making use of the talent of those “in the know” and aggregating it to the enthusiasts (the wider public). after my latest conversation on NNM i don’t think it matters how any of us find the music, but what is interesting to me is what is the music that each of you like. of course the harder job is to how to publishing this information in a usable format. so what i’m proposing is for us to create a aggregated feed of the music we like which can be as simple as this:

a curated-aggregated (re-blog) that features downloadable music that is tagged and organized on a separate website.

in general i think the anybody who is an active participant in these communities should be welcome to curate. i wouldn’t want to base the aesthetic on my own tastes. crowd-sourcing curation from the community to the enthusiast is a much better solution for now. if any of you are familiar with the slashdot and digg.com websites i think there is a similar analogy. slashdot is a curated reblog of the tech community that was supposed to be supplanted by the more neutral and crowd-sourced digg, but interestingly enough after 5 years slashdot still is the better place to go to get the more interesting articles about the tech community. they are focused on one thing while digg.com is a great place to find wider variety of content for a larger mass market. as i alluded to above this is an experiment that i want to try. i think it might work and make it easier for others to find the best music of our community. i always have my non-music creative friends in mind when i’m creating this site.

my good friend john sinclair comes to all my shows and loves reich and nyman, but doesn’t have any idea of where to get music like it (i’m his main source). what this site is primarily is a place for all our friends to find new music. i also assume along the way as the site grows with content we will have a pretty good idea of the breadth of musical aesthetics in our community (while creating our own little record store). although all the music on this site will be free and easily downloadable, there is no reason why it can’t point to our itunes/emusic/rhapsody accounts. if you still aren’t sure the power of free i highly suggest you read chris anderson’s “free” (the link is to his a free podcast version of the book)

for now also think that all of the music on the site has to be downloadable. eventually tools will be made so we can listen to streams anywhere, but i think we are 2-3 years away from that and having many options of how you listen is very important. i know won’t listen to many tracks if i can’t download them to my iphone for later.

although we had a pretty spirited discussion about this on NNM it really helped solidify my ideas. i know there probably will not be consensus, but i’m interested to see what you think.  till the end of the year i will be featuring our favorite tracks from 2009 and the “best of the aughts”.if you want to send your favorites along please send them my way.

thanks,

paul

www.alt-classical.com

originally posted on 12/6/09 on the improv friday social network

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 7:16 am. It is filed under Uncategorized and tagged with aggregation, alt-classical, curation, narrowcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.