PodBop - Music trying to find the fans
You may have read in Jonathan's blog about how PodBop was voted the most popular mashup at David Berlind's MashUp Unconference. PodBop is a web2.0 mashup that scours the web for mp3s of bands that are coming to a nearby venue. With PodBop your three steps to live music are:
- Enter your city and state.
- Listen to bands that are in your town this week.
- Go see a concert.
Ace MIR reporter/analyst Jeremy Pickens says:
There is not really any “content based” music IR in this system, but it is perhaps a good example of a metadata-based search tool. Musical “relevance” might have time+location features attached to it. To be able to go and listen to a few tracks from some unknown band who’ll be playing down the road from you next week is extremely useful. It’s another form of music information discovery.
Jeremy goes on to say:
Imagine also a reverse tool, where bands decide which cities they should tour in, based on the music preferences of fans using this service in various cities. Reverse music IR ... Music trying to find the fans.
Lots of interesting possibilities to be sure. It'd be interesting if some of the music discovery services such as last.fm or musicmobs collected some extra bits of data such as the geographic location of the listener, it would open the doors for all sorts of geographic based MIR systems. Ian Knopke of McGill university presented a paper at ISMIR 2005 describing a technique for locating sound and music files geographically, but that is very different than finding where the listeners are located. Maybe the next cool mashup would be a frappr map that shows the spread of a new song from a new band from its first performances in the local club to the point when its spread across the country and appears on the Billboard charts.
Be sure to read PodBop creator Taylor McKnights blog: GTMCKNIGHT