So, context: I’m on Myspace, ReverbNation, Last.fm, Facebook and Twitter. Oh, and Youtube, Vimeo, Seesmic, Phreadz…etc. etc.
All of them are social networks. On all of them, not surprisingly, I get followed/added/friended by a lot of musicians and bands.
Which is all well and good, except that I can’t listen to them. Not ‘won’t‘, ‘can’t‘ – the numbers don’t add up. Even if we ignore the 8000 myspace friends I deleted before christmas, we’re still looking and thousands of interactions. Even if I only listened to one song from each, that’s upwards of 4000 minutes of listening time, just to grant each of them a cursory ear. And given that a handful of them will really catch my imagination, I’ll probably end up listening to them a lot over time.
Add in that my listening time is already taken up by copious amounts of the music I love and a fair chunk of trusted friend recommendations, and the amount of time I have available to check out random stuff thrown at me on Myspace is tiny.
So what are we to do?
Let’s use me as TWO case studies. First as a music fan/listener.
Some facts about music-listening-Stevie:
- I love discovering new music
- Other than ‘it’s great’, it’s pretty tough for me to define a type of music I like. The one nearly-unifying element is that I tend to go for music with a story, whether vocal or instrumental.
- [As it relates to the second point, ‘Solo bass’ is not, as far as I can tell, a genre. Neither should it be.]
- I listen to an awful lot of music by people I know/have met.
- I discover a lot of music from friends recommending it.
- I have online a list of ALL the music I’ve listened to over the last 5 years.
- Meeting an artist quite often moves their music from ‘have heard‘ to ‘required listening‘ in my estimations.
- That being said, the majority of my music listening time is spent listening to things I already love.
So, what does all that mean?
It means I’m not going to listen to a band just because they ‘add’ me. I resent the idea that I should spend my valuable time on music without context. The worst culprits of this (it’s why I included it in the list above) are solo bass players. I say ‘worst’ – to be fair, it makes sense that they would send stuff my way. After all, I am a solo bass player and am interested in what’s going on within the field of solo bass performance, but only as it over-laps with great music! I’ve never been into the gymnastic, technical side of music. If it doesn’t work as a straight recording, without explanation, it doesn’t work for me.
Right, so just sending me a message saying ‘check out my solo bass stuff‘ isn’t going to cut it. which of those other points give us angles to work?
What we need to look for are where the filters are, and how to get into those filter-streams. So what flags music for me as being worth investigating? largly these two:
- My friends recommend it,
- or I know the artist…
It’s pretty safe to say that ALL the musicians on twitter that I’ve bothered to click through and listen to are those who I find interesting apart from their music.
Is it an efficient way of finding great music? Possibly, possibly not. But it does provide me with a few things:
- a way of just cutting down the sheer numbers. Relatively arbitrarily, but it works.
- a way into one of those things I like about music: the story – I’m actually getting the story first, then the soundtrack…
- a way of making sure I’m less likely to listen to music by people I don’t like. There’s SO MUCH amazing music out there, I might as well limit myself to listening to the ones I really like as people 🙂
- a way of encouraging people AWAY from spam and TOWARDS engagement. It’s what I want, it’s what I do, it’s what works.
And In Part II of ‘The Problem Of Time’, I’ll talk about what this does for me as a musician.
How does this chime with your experience of finding music online? Similar? Completely different? How much GREAT music have you found? I’d love to hear your experiences.