Alright - I'm up to week 9 of OCLS Learn 2.0. Whew, there's a lot to go through. This week covers digital music. I couldn't help but remember while reading about music piracy all those hours spent in my childhood with a tape recorder held next to the stereo speaker and yelling at the djs to quit talking over the beginning of the song that I wanted to record. The record companies didn't care as much because the sound quality was so gosh darn bad on those recordings that I ended up buying the album/tape anyway. Nothing like the quality you get today when ripping a copy of a cd.
The DRM issue also made me think of how the recording industry and radio is struggling with their identity the same way we are. They're trying to hold on to how they've always done things, while trying to find their place in the future of music dissemination. By not embracing and working with the changes that are occurring, are they taking the chance of becoming obsolete? As more and more music artists and fans use MySpace and music applications on the Internet, will they end up circumventing record companies completely? We'll just have to wait and see how things develop.
The more exciting part of the week's activities was looking at all of the music applications. I really liked the visual map that Liveplasma provides. I will probably use this application in the future. I didn't get a lot out of Last.fm, but will keep an eye on it for what changes will come about now that CBS bought them. I'd also like to try out their radio when I'm home. I'm intrigued by the statement, "Last.fm radio learns what you like and gets better." Musicstrands didn't spark my interest and Upto11 didn't impress me either.
Last, I looked at Music Map which brings me to the title of today's blog post. I started with a search for Harry Connick Jr. which listed Keith Urban fairly close by. I then clicked on Keith Urban and the resulting map actually had Weird Al Yankovic closer than Vince Gill. Greater possibility that Keith Urban fans will like Weird Al rather than Vince Gill? And a search for Blue October gives results that run from Kelly Clarkson and Nick Lachey to Ratt and Quiet Riot. Huh? Kinda fun though :-)
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2 comments:
"Musicstrands didn't spark my interest and Upto11 didn't impress me either." What about these sites did you not like?
musicmap sounds like a Grokkeresque map? Same company?
I, too had interesting random results on liveplasma. When I searched for George Strait the map included mostly contemporary female artists. For some reason, I found this strange. Also, I did a search for my new favorite band of the week (Bullet for My Valentine) and got strange results. I am thinking BFMV is not actually in the database yet--the site did make a map of artists in the same genre--pretty smart!
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