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Music Blogs and Lazy Discovery

I got a couple of skeptical questions regarding my assertion that incorporating music blogs as curators gives ExtensionFM a wonderful platform to start from when thinking about music discovery, so rather than responding individually I’ll just post a little more in this area.

As a review, let’s recall that ExtensionFM makes us all into smart spiders: every user is browsing the web and uncovering sites that post music, and all of that information flows back to ExFM. As I noted before, that data can be sliced and diced in subtle and sophisticated ways, of course, but there are also simple uses that can be incredibly powerful.

Take the less musically-obsessed user as an example. While music geeks usually find that they build an ExFM library with astonishing speed just by making the rounds of their usual music bloggy haunts, people who just like having some cool new music to listen to once in a while need more help – they know that they like that MGMT song they heard a while ago, but not where to look for more music they might like.

And here’s where the music bloggers come in. Rather than spending the up-front time to build that subtle and sophisticated slicer-dicer tool for music recommendation, ExtensionFM can take the simple approach.

[Editor’s note: that’s “can take” rather than “will take” in the prior sentence, as I have no knowledge regarding whether ExFM plans to build something like I describe. Though since I believe that the entire staff of ExFM follows me on Tumblr, I will note that I’d love to see this, kids…its utility wouldn’t be limited to the musically clueless.]

Let’s say that as a new ExFM user with an empty library Alice sees a little search form: a text box and a pull-down that has “artist,” “album,” and “song name” listed. Alice puts “Jimi Hendrix,” or “Expo 86,” or “Temecula Sunrise” into that text box and then hits the search button.

ExFM checks the database that you, I, and all the other users have built, finds sources that have posted music that match the given term, and then returns a list of ten sources with the matching element and, say, five or ten other songs that the source has posted. Alice can then choose to listen to the music or add those sources to her library right from the search results.

That’s instant discovery for those who don’t know where to start – and because ExFM automatically updates Alice’s library, that one-time action on her part provides her with a continuing stream of new music.

What’s powerful here is that ExFM doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel: the people posting music are already doing curation and pattern matching on the music (in a more interesting way than any algorithm I’ve ever come across, to boot), and ExFM’s users are finding those people posting the music.

ExFM just provides the glue that’s missing, and then makes all the work that’s already being done on the Web easily accessible to Alice. Yes, that’s not quite as easy as I make it sound, either from a technical or a UX perspective, but it’s a lot easier than taking on the entire end-to-end workload.

Now this middleman role certainly isn’t the endpoint of it all, but it’s an example of how ExFM is positioned to make really effective use of the existing music ecosystem to offer great immediate value to users while the ExFM crew works on the huge list of hard and interesting problems that are queued up for music in the next few years, online, offline, and in between.