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Subject: RTP-area local music and culture

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  • From: grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: The Future Of Music (was: Re: If the Indy award posed with a gun, would you vote anyway?)
  • Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 12:28:46 -0400

bendy(a)lostpla[dot]net wrote:

http://wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

That is really fascinating. I think a lot of us here would probably have been sort of able to intuit part of it (as we've talked Amazon at length & Netflix more than once as well, I think) but some of the data in that are just amazing, like f'rinstance:

"The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are."

There's a filtering-the-filters problem there too, though. There are search engines in development that might work better than google for specific tasks, but does anyone want to search for them? There will probably be some sort of aggregation of the music tastemakers, the way Metafilter and BoingBoing have become the top of the "cool link" blogs. Maybe that is what will replace labels. Rock critics can't just send semaphore from the mountaintops.

If only we could get the email addresses of all the music consumers with good taste & email them a free sample of our goodies . . .

Suddenly the argument of the UCE'ers that "spam has its place" becomes momentarily almost swallowable.

There are already mp3blog blogs. Or, my personal current fave meme of the week: using a wget script to scrape mp3s from multiple mp3 blogs and then store them in a folder hierarchy that indicates which mp3 blog they came from. You get 100s of new mp3s to listen to, and if you notice something that interests you, you can figure out where it came from & go looking for more . . .

And for bands at this level, the challenge becomes the Magician Problem. What is the difference between a professional magician and an amateur? There are amateur magicians every bit as skilled as the pros. But the professional magician gets to show the same twenty tricks to different people each night, while the amateur has come up with different tricks to show the same twenty people.

Dang, I hadn't ever heard that analogy before. It's beautiful. I knew I should've paid attention in school.

Ross





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