Consumer Music Taste Sharing – Derek Slater

Last week I went to a cool session on Consumer-to-Consumer Sharing of Playlists led by Derek Slater at the Tuesday lunch series at the Berkman Center. This is topic near to me as I create and use playlists frequently for my iPod Shuffles. More and more of music listening is through these playlists. A younger friend put all his CDs on his iPod and then sold all the CDs on eBay after backing the files up. I have not gone that far but I do make sure that I back up my music whenever I back up my hard drive.

Playlists are becoming very popular. In the iTunes music store, people can publish their play lists. By recent count, 330,000 playlists have been posted at iTunes. At musicstrands.com you can listen to 30 seconds of a song on a playlist and buy songs you like. There have been 500,000 playlists published at Musicstrands. Derek also mentioned Coverville, a “podcast, produced three times a week, that focuses on cover songs - a new rendition of a previously recorded song. The show is produced and hosted by Brian Ibbott…features a combination of music and information about the music…On average, each show runs about 35 minutes and features six selections. Information about the performing artist, and source album is provided, along with information about the artist being covered.”

Several people blogged on this session including Jessica Baumgart (with Consumer-to-Consumer Sharing of Playlists), Dave Weinberger, and Derek himself with his post, Reclaiming Sharing. Derek has also set up a Berkman H20 Playlist on Playlists. I wrote about the H20 playlists (not to be confused with music playlists) recently in, The Berkman Center’s H20 Project – Creating Innovative Learning Environments. As the H20 Playlists description reads, “This playlist contains links related to new music playlist sharing tools and other sharing tools. It also links to articles about the business and cultural impacts these tools might have.”

You can get a free copy of the report that Derek did on the subject, Consumer Taste Sharing Is Driving the Online Music Business and Democratizing Culture, with Mike McGuire of Gartner. Some of the key findings include:

- One tenth of people surveyed (who use playlists) say that they often make music purchases based on other’s recommendations. This number seems small to me, given the sample.
- One fourth of frequent online music users say that the ability to share music is an important criteria for what online music service they use.
- They predict that by 2010 one fourth of online music store transactions will be driven by playlists and other similar tools built into online stores.

I especially liked Derek’s comments that putting together a playlist is a creative act, in itself. It is also a satisfying activity, especially for people who cannot produce music themselves. I derive great pleasure from the ability to assemble my own music. This started with just the ability to not include cuts on a CD I did not like but has progressed to themes, modes, and other objectives.

Comments

[Benjamin B. Sargent]

Hi Bill,

http://www.riffin.com/ is a site based on exactly the principles Derek Slater discusses. Riffin' [sic] lets users sign up as "Webjockeys" and build annotated playlists. Webjockeys are paid cash when other visitors make song purchases from their playlists. The songs are legal downloads of DRM-wrapped WMA files, and the built-in library includes samples and jewelcase art for 4.3M songs.

Here is what the annotated playlist looks like ("Disco's Alive With Vengeance"): http://www.riffin.com/ViewPlaylist.aspx?PlaylistId=1091

[note: It's a site I've been involved with, so let me know if I can answer any questions you may have.]

[Bill Ives]

Ben

Thanks for your comment. I am going to look at Riffin and will likely write about it.