The New Muscial Functionality
Clay raps it out - some more…..
Tom Coates has the first of what looks like a fantastic series of posts on the
new musical functionality, an extended musing on the distribution of
production, reproduction, and filtering of music, covering especially the newly
social context.
Over the next few days I’m going to write about some of the
core trends that I’m seeing in people’s use of digital music, attempting to
extrapolate from some current behaviours that we’re all observing around us -
concentrating on how people wish to interact and use their music. I’m not going
to spend too much time on the way some people may wish to legislate against
these desires or build around them - because I believe for the most part that
any attempt to do so will inevitably fail. Competing models that more adequately
fulfil those needs will rise to take over in their place. […] I’ll be talking
about four major areas that seem to me to be indicative of the
unevenly-distributed musical functionality of the future - (1) portability and
access, (2) navigation, (3) self-presentation and social uses of music and (4)
data use and privacy.
core trends that I’m seeing in people’s use of digital music, attempting to
extrapolate from some current behaviours that we’re all observing around us -
concentrating on how people wish to interact and use their music. I’m not going
to spend too much time on the way some people may wish to legislate against
these desires or build around them - because I believe for the most part that
any attempt to do so will inevitably fail. Competing models that more adequately
fulfil those needs will rise to take over in their place. […] I’ll be talking
about four major areas that seem to me to be indicative of the
unevenly-distributed musical functionality of the future - (1) portability and
access, (2) navigation, (3) self-presentation and social uses of music and (4)
data use and privacy.
Among the social apps that I think relate to his thesis but which he doesn’t
(yet) mention are:
* songBuddy
* MusicPlasma
* MusicMobs
* Webjay
And, as an added flavor bonus, here’s a City of Sound post I’ve been meaning
to blog on socialising listening habits, tied mostly to the features of audioscrobbler, which Coates also regards as essential.