It’s interesting how theory and praxis merge in these settings–in theory, one wishes in a more open music culture to permit as much importation as one is comfortable with doing–and then the praxis of how technologically to achieve the right comfort level comes into play. I lack the knowledge to address that set of issues, but they still interest me.

It’s the same kind of strategy as a Flash widget. You don’t distribute the MP3, you distribute your web presence as a whole.

Personally I wasn’t hearing this in the manifesto.

Patrick, I liked the graphics on your MILA page a lot. The page is dominated by pictures and songs instead of text and controls. That makes it feel more musical and less like a web app.

A Flash widget on Myspace will do the job pretty well. It lacks the integrated Myspace functionality that their widget has, like the “add” button to add a song to your profile, but that’s not a big loss.

So, yeah, this is absolutely a win. On Myspace a musician just needs to set up a widget that auto-imports their music from a standard URL they host. That’s what I did for my own profile. And it’s incredibly convenient — I just add a blog entry tagged “audio” to the soupgreens blog and any MP3 link in the entry will show up in the player on my Myspace profile.

The downside is theoretical on Myspace. If they ever get their act together with vertical features like rating, it’ll become an issue. I figure they will do a big push here for the provisioning company they just created.

I think you’re right–we are moving beyond sharing mp3s into sharing culture in a context.
This is why, I think, I rarely download a free mp3 from soundclick (unless I know the artist in another context), but often download a netlabel release from a label I reapect (or an ad on the yahoo message group that “gets it” into a context I understand).

That could be done with an image, a video, an enticing “container” for the music itself.

We’re talking about moving beyond the sharing of mp3 files and getting into a world of sharing music in a way that gives it more meaning via it’s context.