In honor of the start of the SXSW Music Festival on Wednesday, Cameron and I tackle the world of online music and its social application, this week on the Overflow podcast.
In particular two services are on our radar, Pandora and Blip.fm.
We were both early adopters of Pandora and have nothing but great admiration for the work that Tim Westergren and the rest of the gang at the Music Genome Project have provided. The site and the IPhone app have greatly changed the way that we listen to and discover music online, and the efforts to save internet radio from regulation and over-taxation from the record labels has not gone unnoticed.
It is the social aspect of Blip.fm that puts it in a unique position in relation to Pandora. On Blip there is a follower & following relationship with your favorite DJ’s as well as micro-messaging features as you add comments to the song you have chosen to “blip”. Although Pandora has the ability to share the stations that a user has been seeding with others, it does not contain that direct back and forth messaging capability that makes this so social … and sharing and discussing music is certainly social!
In a recent interview on Net@Night with Leo Laporte and Sarah Lane, Blip.fm founder Jeff Yasuda hinted at some developments coming along for the company including the release of an IPhone app .. as well as a way of converting the hard earned “props” from other listeners into something more tangible, making it some form of Blip currency. That will be fun, potentially exchanging props for swag, music, tshirts, etc.
He is also working with the record labels to provide back catalog tunes so that any song that you want to blip is available to you. Currently they are using a music search service called Screamer that seeks and indexes any mp3’s that are on line. Blip must overcome the copyright issues if they are going to be able to grow the business to its greatest potential.
Blip.fm might be a way for social media latecomers to understand the benefits of other micro-messaging services such as twitter. There is also a way to cross over your social graphs by finding twitter and friendfeed followers who match up to Blip.fm users.
Check out our Overflow playlist with the songs that we’ve used as openings to our show.
One of the big picture questions that these services raise is this …. Does an algorithm or a person do better at helping you discover music? Let us know which you believe is the best in the comments section.
We wrap the podcast by diverging into reminiscing about the good old days of looking at album art and liner notes, and how we interact with an album versus the current “glowing screen” interaction…. there is a progression from the early days of being alone with an album sitting in the dark with the headphones on, to the current social sharing of music with others on Blip.fm.
Joe is on Blip at http://blip.fm/joemagennis and Cameron can be found at http://blip.fm/coolpapac
