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April 21, 2004
Webjay: Lucas Gonze goes after user-created music filtering
Posted by Clay Shirky
So last year, I was bitching about how
the music industry is stifling the inevitable "Big Flip", where you switch from a "filter, then publish" model for analog production, to a "publish, then filter" model for digital production, where content is first made available, and _then_ sorted for quality. (This is how Google and Blogdex work, for example.) I was in particular lamenting the lack of user-generated filtering that could break the bottleneck of the A&R (Artists and Repetoire) departments of the big music firms.
So now my homeboy Lucas Gonze has gone and built it. It's
Webjay, a site for trading user-generated playlists. Best of all, it's designed for playlists that feature music that is legitimately available over the web:
Even though we won't censor users, we would be grateful if users would censor themselves. Webjay exists to promote music which has been authorized for distribution on the web, not to make it easier to find unauthorized music. Please do not post links to unauthorized music. It will bring trouble. It will promote hoarded music at the expense of music libre. It will be stupid -- posting hoarded music on the web is a really bad idea.
So you get three filters in one -- someone else has vetted the music for quality, the music is rolled up in thematic playlists, further raising the "If you like X, you might also like Y" quotient, and everything you hear is (at least putatively) music libre.
Comments (6)
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1. Lucas on April 21, 2004 4:30 PM writes...
The key thing that happened to make this possible was to create/find/scavenge hypertext formats capable of carrying music. What was holding us up what the HTML just can't do the job.
Permalink to Comment2. Tom Steinberg on April 21, 2004 7:10 PM writes...
This is good, but www.audioscrobbler.com is in a whole different class.
Permalink to Comment3. Lucas on April 21, 2004 7:19 PM writes...
Got URLs for those Audioscrobbler songs, Tom?
Permalink to Comment4. Seb on April 21, 2004 7:30 PM writes...
Lucas: Touché! Still, Audioscrobbler has some very neat features.
Permalink to Comment5. Lucas on April 21, 2004 9:55 PM writes...
Absolutely right, Seb. No slam intended on Audioscrobbler, which is really good on its own terms.
Permalink to Comment6. Scott on May 13, 2004 5:25 PM writes...
Yah, dude, there are URLs... For example, this... Anyways, AudioScrobbler is working close with MusicBrainz, the most important music metadata project created. (It sounds a little big, but MusicBrainz is a springboard for the new killer app, I am sure)
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