a new generation of web music apps

I tried out Chompin yesterday. Really fun and inspiring. It’s a cousin of Shuffler.fm and Extension.fm.

Nearby older relations are Hype Machine, Elbo.ws, Yahoo Media Player, and the Webjay “Play this page” feature.

Some ways to talk about the zeitgeist:

  1. Keep music from the web in the web. Don’t go to a music blog, download a track, and then listen in iTunes. Keep bookmarks of tracks from the web together with the source where you found them. And don’t download at all, leave the files at their source HTTP URLs.
  2. Keep content and context together. When you play back a track from a music blog, go back to the blog.
  3. Make playlists of out music blog entries. As you play each song, open the source site. When the song is over move on to the next site.
  4. Web pages as digital music packaging. Opening a particular page gets you album art, rich metadata, liner notes, interactivity.

11 thoughts on “a new generation of web music apps

  1. Also blip.fm, twitter !listening or whatever hashtag, commercial quality fan-careated youtube videos…

    You’ve been talking about the content/context idea for a long time; it’s nice to see some evolution in this direction. If an artist releases work into the wild under cc: for instance, hopefully any supplemental material like artwork sticks with the work, rather than straight file-sharing (which does have a place, I suppose).

    But when I log on to twitter and people are talking about what they are watching on the box *right now*, this immediacy is a different sort of context, which you kind of approach with blip.fm and audioscrobbling. Or forum-skulking while listening to my favourite internet radio station. I mean, I love that people are talking about the new Arcade Fire album, but it’s really still a large number of independent leaks, without the immediacy of a dialog.

    >>> Don’t go to a music blog, download a track, and then listen in iTunes.

    This is amazing advice. But we’re a culture of headphone junkies.

    1. Seeing as being in a car is about not looking at the screen, I guess you wouldn’t be doing much reading. OTOH, you could absolutely hook up the headphone out from your Android device to aux in of your car stereo and listen to the blog stream.

  2. Someone told me recently that “roadcasting” was going to be the future of broadcasting, and he was serious; however…

    The Ford F-150 comes with the Opera browser standard, right? SO you could use Opera Unite or whatever they call their built in browser-webserver thing to expose your playlists and videos and things. Or something. OTOH, umm, well…

  3. Lucas, mahaloz for the review and comment. We love to evolve and encourage feedback to help us dial in the perfect amount of goodness and win for everyone.

    As far as Clone, we’ve been working on Chompin for a few years now, just not something we have actively marketed. Our focus is mobile.

  4. @Andreas. No. I don’t believe any of us are doing anything but trying to provide ways to help people discover music

    If anything, Apple’s ping is copying all of us :)

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