[cc-community] 10k great Free songs (was Re: Rcrd Lbl to offer CC and Free as in Beer Music)

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Tue Nov 20 06:22:04 EST 2007


OK, so *this* is funny.

>> That doesn't scale well at all.

> But it *has* worked well for me.

I'm talking about group dynamics and
you focus on you. I might as well have
said that most people lose when they
play the lottery, only to have you inform
me that you won the jackpot once.

Great. I'm glad for you. It could very
well be that you've got a number of
sources of music to the point that you're
satisfied with your arrangement. Does that
change the group dynamics at all?

Did you hear the other people on the list
who mentioned their issue with slugging
through 10,000 songs and most of it was
stuff they didn't like? I spend a couple
months going through Magnatune and come up
with maybe a dozen or so artists that I like?

Do you get that *you* winning the lottery
doesn't prove that *everyone* should win
the lottery?

All I've been saying is that music doesn't
work the same way as software. That doesn't
mean it won't work at all. But telling me
it's working for you isn't telling anything
at all about whether or not it's working
the *same* or not.

There are issues in finding the "good" music
that just isn't a problem with software.
You only need to find one good compiler, one good
editor, one good word processor, one good spreadsheet.
Forking is generally discouraged. If you have a
modification, the developers generally prefer to
roll it into what they have, rather than forking it
off into two different applications.

Music is all about variety. One good song doesn't
do much for your playlist. People need to find
gigabytes worth of music. And once they've listened
to that playlist a few times, it'll get old and they'll
want more, different.

The iPod shuffle can hold about a hundred songs.
I own one. It drives me nuts. It was too much work
trying to keep circulating the music on my ishuffle
from the library of music I had on my PC.
I stopped using it. How long do you think 100 "good"
songs will last if that's all people are playing on
their iPod? A couple months? Maybe?

Little factoid for you: The number one reason that
most people buy a novel? Because it was written
by an author they read before and they liked the
previous novel. This was something I heard from a
book publisher about a year ago. In the era of
the internet and the possibility of being able to
order any book you want and all the reviews that could
be available, and everything else, it still comes
down to the problem of the search. Of finding material
you like. And according to this publisher, the number
one reason people buy a book is because they already
knew they liked something else the author wrote.

That to me says the issue of the search, of finding
what's good, of separating the wheat from the chaff,
is, on a group level, not prone to technical solutions.

I realize it isn't quite the same as music.
There are larger investments of time in reading
a book than in listening to music. But in both
cases it comes down to a subjective experience,
of finding the stuff you like, of finding the "good".
And that isn't a problem that is solvable by any
whizbang gizmo gadget just yet.

Even with all the amazon stuff about "people who
bought this book also bought these other books".
Even with all the online reviews you want.
Even with all the different people trying to
offer help and point people in the direction of
books they might like. Even with all that, the sales
figures tell a simple truth. *MOST* people buy authors
they've already read. None of the current existing
technical solutions have changed the way most people
choose what books they buy.

Now, if you come back and tell me you always try
to buy some author you've never heard of, maybe
some author that some third party recommended,
then once again you are missing the point.
You can't change the sales data. It is a fact.
It comes straight from a publisher. And it was
something they said only a year ago. For *most* people,
all the existing methods to try and help or sway them
to buy one book or another does *not* change their
buying habits. They buy authors they already know.

I don't have sales data for music. But looking at
the issues, it seems to me that music is a lot
closer to novels than it is to software. THe problem
is sifting through and finding the "good". THis
goes for artists who are looking for existing stuff
to derive from, and it goes for listeners who simply
want to fill up their iPod with a few gigabytes.

I think folks are probably more open to gamble
three minutes of their life listening to something
they never heard of before. But again, I point out
the people on this list who posted their experience
with slugging through thousands of songs all completely
new to them. Radio stations might help, but it doesn't
change the fundamental problem. And I think that the
sales data for novels show that at some point, you
just can't solve some problems with third party
aggregators, taste masters, play lists, and stuff like
that.

And maybe it can get to the point that it is
"good enough". But that wasn't my point, was it?
I keep saying that it isn't neccessarily insolvable.
I keep saying that it's a different problem than
free software presented.

Greg



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