Music 2.0 is really a silly term.  If there's such a thing as Music 2.0 it probably occurred many thousands of years ago - when the first vocal group went from singing tutti - to singing in harmony, or perhaps Music 2.0 officially began when a human voice was accompanied for the first time by a tuned drum.  Nevertheless, we need to label this new movement in the online music world - and since it seems to be part of the Web 2.0 era, these new online sites are called Music 2.0.  

Music 2.0 sites fall into a number of camps:

  • music services - places like iTunes and Rhapsody where you can purchase or subscribe to music
  • Music discovery - places that help you find music -  these fall generally into 3 subcategories:
    • Social - wisdom of the crowds sites like last.fm, iLike. Goombah and Qloud
    • Content-based - recommendations  based on the music content - Pandora, SoundFlavor, MusicIP
    • Expert based - Music recommendations from people - music blogs, irateradio.com
  • Music experience augmentation - sites to make your music listening experience more enjoyable - this includes playlisting sites like MusicMobs,  fiql and Webjay - music dashboards like sleevenotez or Snapp Radio
  • Music meta data  - add to the data surrounding the music - MusicBrainz, All Music Guide, Gracenote
There are many other types too - it's hard to categorize them all.

Keeping track of what is going on in the Music 2.0 world is hard. It seems that every week there's a new Music 2.0 site that does something new and different.  There are a few online lists that try to capture all of the Music 2.0 companies.  There's Musick in the head's list of Music 2.0 Companies and there's this Music Matrix from Dave's imaginary sound space that is a directory that seems to be mostly about social tagging as applied to music.  In order to keep track of this ever expanding space I'd love to build a detailed living directory of all of the music 2.0 companies.  Not just a list of the companies, but a detailed directory including:

  • Detailed description of the site that describes all of the features
  • The reach (estimated number of users)
  • Descriptions of web services offered (if any)
  • The catalog size (where applicable the number of songs managed)

It would be great to have such a directory, but building the directory seems like a huge job - one that I don't think I'd have time to do by myself.  This, however, may be a perfect task for the wikipedia model - where lots of people contribute the content. I know that there are a number of folks that are interested in music 2.0 who read this blog. If you think you would be interested in contributing to a wikipedia page on Music 2.0 send me an email at Paul.Lamere [at] sun.com.  If enough people offer to help, we'll get started on building the Ultimate Music 2.0 Directory.

Comments:

Paul, Thanks for the mention on my ever growing list. It actually started for a short list you had posted a few weeks ago. I started to dump them all in to Competitio.us a couple of weeks ago, but found it hard to keep up with (hence the simple delicious tags now). I'd be interested in helping build the directory....

Posted by J (aka MuSick in the Head) on December 11, 2006 at 08:23 AM EST #

Isn't iRATE a social service? When I last used it a few years ago, it was all about getting automated recommendations from similar users.

Posted by Andrew Hitchcock on December 11, 2006 at 01:48 PM EST #

[Trackback] I'm building my presence of a range of the social networking sites connected with music and entertainment. Some of them I've been on for over two years; some of them I've been on for a matter of days. So far

Posted by Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll on December 11, 2006 at 07:15 PM EST #

Paul, I started the wiki. It's just a framework right now, but here it goes... http://music2dot0.wetpaint.com/

Posted by Jason Herskowitz on December 16, 2006 at 11:19 AM EST #

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.

This blog copyright 2010 by plamere