I linked to The Metasciences yesterday because I like their music - kinda quirky anti-folk which reminds me of Jeffrey Lewis’ solo work and the stuff my mate Steve Ball has been recording in our living room (more on this later…) - but how they bubbled up into my consciousness is, I think, interesting.
Warren Ellis runs a podcast called The Apparat Programme comprised of mp3s sent to him by unsigned bands which he edits (with no speech) into a half hour show. Feedback implied that a lot of people though the Metasciences were the standout act so he gave them a plug which I took him up on.
This is interesting because of the combination of randomness and curatorship along with Warren’s uncanny feel for how the internet works. On the one side you’ve got this chaotic mass of music out there with no easy way to navigate through it without some serious commitment and on the other side you’ve got people who recommend stuff based on their own point of view and singular experience. Neither of these are optimal, the former being too wide and the latter being far to subjective. To put it another way, if you’re listening to music chosen by Joe Muso as part of the Joe Muso experience then that’s great, but if you don’t really care for Joe or 90% of the music he recommends then you need to do some filtering, and if you can’t be bothered then you’re going to miss out on that 10%.
What we have here is a middle ground. Unless I’m horribly mistaken, Warren isn’t wholeheartedly recommending all the music in the Apparat Programme, merely filtering out the dross and leaving in stuff that has a certain spark. A kind of “not shit” criteria if you like, acting as a primary filter which will lead to other things. He then notices chatter about one of the bands (which he might not even have paid too much attention to when putting the show together) and gives them a blog entry with all the weight of his endorsement that implies, allowing those who can’t be bothered with the podcast itself (I’ve got about five of them sitting there unlistened at the moment) to cut right to the good stuff.
Certainly, this kind of swarming recommendation is nothing new - the del.icio.us popular aggregator works along these lines - but it’s the human hand involved that interests me. Maybe it’s nothing special and goes on all the time, but there’s something about Warren throwing a load of music at his readers and getting them to sort through it swarm-style that appeals.
I’m now wondering if something like this for Birmingham unsigned bands would work, but in the meantime go to The Metasciences MySpace page, scroll down a bit, and download their album. It’s very good.
As with all podcasts there is a limit to the amount I can listen too in a week, say if you did a 10 minute slot featuring say four bands. To get any sort of feedback you would need more than a few people to download it, listen to it, form an opinion and then be arsed enough to give feedback.
In contrast a Flash music player like on myspace gives a musical snippet and a form for instant reply.
Okay, WTF is ‘anti-folk’????
I explain Anti-folk.
Wikipedia
Tom: I’m with you there - don’t think I’ve listened to a whole podcast in the last week or so though I do tend to save them for a rainy day.
I think, however, that putting up barriers makes the feedback more valid. If you’ve got a half hour show with no-one intoducing the tracks meaning they’ve got to seek out listings and then be bothered to email / comment, that feedback has a real value. Of course, that’s assuming you actually get any.
With MySpace, and other instant feedback systems, you get plenty of comments but the investment needed to make them in slight so it doesn’t mean as much long term.
Both have their advantages of course…
Pete, do you remember my “whole new podcast” concept I mentioned a while back. Tom’s pretty much described what I was/am thinking. Called Coffee Time (see what I did there), it’d be three, maybe four, tracks and between 10 and 15 minutes long. Because it would take less time to listen to, you’d be more likely too, and because it would take less time to put together, I’d be more likely too.
That was the theory, anyway …
Were we drunk?
I can see something coming together along those lines…
Surprisingly, we weren’t …
I thought MySpace was evil, or is that, like soooo last August?
I am in a state of terrible conflict about this, but I think it boils down to:
Social networking service - bloody appalling
Music discovery service - much better than anything else out there.
With the disclaimer that what is already out there is pretty awful so being much better doesn’t really mean much.