Music 2.0 = Music Discovery Chaos?

Tuesday, March 17th at 05:00 PM
Presenters:
Elliott Hurst – Supernova.com
Sandy Hurst – Supernova.com

Supernova.com started as an indie band tracking company. At some point that transitioned to an online band/concert tracking service. How does supernova.com expose the music and bands on their site to the public so people can find what they’re looking for? In the past radio or V was the only want to find new music. It used to come from record stores or friends. Very little interaction or feedback, based on very few metrics (sales, call-ins). The internet changed everything. There are now many many ways to discover new music (Pandora, Last.fm, etc.). Power has been taken away from the small group of "experts." Now that there are more ways to find music, we’re encountering information overload. Selections are determined by computers and algorithms. What is music 2.0?

What does everyone use to discover music?

• Napster – Find someone with a similar playlist and look aroud to find other songs in that user’s playlist.
• Used to listen to MTV, now read blogs recommended by friends. Go to shows a lot.
• Spotify (UK) – desktop client you can listen streaming, searching for artists. You can share tracks or lists with your friends.
• Pitchfork blog – expert based music opinion, friend recommendations
• Muffin – recommendations, problems with new artists since there is no crowd for them. Popular artists get recommended a lot since they are in many many playlists.
• Last.fm and Purevolume – PV plugs a personality into the recommendation engine.
• New iPhone SDK now allows access to play count to third parties to plug into.
• We7.com – however you come in via a particular music/song entry point, you should see similar music choices.

There was a small argument with the people in the room between the human recommendations vs. computer (sounds like) recommendations.

A typical itunes library has a huge scattering or artists, doesn’t make it easy to make recommendations.

Several people in the room were complaining that it is too hard to find new/good music because there is too much choice out there(?). "Who has time for that?" The flip side is the old way of finding music which to me sounds even more difficult (DJ’s and friend recommendations). I would much rather have too much choice (is that possible?) than having very little choice, or not being able find someone to trust from a small pool of choices. A sentiment was that a computer simply can’t stand up to a computer when picking music – it’s an art.

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