seaninsound: Clearly, the once bright dead star...

Clearly, the once bright dead star that is the Murdoch-owned MySpace may seem the most obvious parallel for a music-centred community but a lot of the functionality, of presenting personal charts and sharing your loves, has been done incredibly well by Last.fm. A lot of the feed functionality also looks a lot like the somewhat clunky, flog-it-to-your-friends pyramid scheme-ish mFlow and quite blatantly like Facebook, which doesn’t limit your sharing and loves to “just” music. These “social” bells and whistles, feels a bit like Apple awkwardly following the class of ‘06, rather than boldly leading the way.

I guess the main problem (for people like me, which I accept isn’t their core target market) is that this wasn’t iTunes launching a Netflix for music. This wasn’t “buy an iPod, pay a tenner a month and fill yer boots!”

Pretty much what I was thinking about it. Except, the only downside to subscription music is when the subscription runs out and for some folks, that can be difficult to go from having music in your possession to renting it. One of the things I will say has eroded my music allegiances is the fact that I have so much access to a bevy of bands. But the flip side is, I’ve been introduce to a ton of bands I’d never have loved as much as I do, if it weren’t for the ability to pick ‘n mix whatever I want to hear whenever rather than being constrained by buying only whatever I could afford.

I don’t have the budget for say, 10 albums a month. But an album a month for access to everything? That’s a deal that usually works and indeed the wave of some kind of future. I’ve seen more concerts in the past five years as a result of this than I had prior to that, when I was mostly a consumer of physical music products.

I haven’t opted into Ping yet and while I’m curious to see how it works, I don’t really want another service that takes information that’s already somewhere else and shares it with g-d knows who, in the interest of “sharing.”

seaninsound