April 29th, 2012



The Art of the Playlist

Something really missing in social music right now is a great, sublime, amazing playlist experience. I use playlists primarily as a way to discover new artists or to assign a soundtrack to a certain mood. While usually I make my own (was a huge maker of mix CDs back in the day), I do like to listen to playlists made by others. That said, so far it has been extremely tough to find the gems because the bulk of playlists are mostly bad or lame. Perhaps the best example of a sweet playlist is the Hype Machine Zeitgeist, which unfortunately only comes out once a year.

Want to point out, though, that applying blanket “social filtering” is not the answer (point echoed by Hunter Walk over the weekend). While social filtering is helpful, I am not sure it is the “killer app” in this harder-than-we-though playlist challenge.

This challenge made me think of Muxtape, the NYC-based mixtape startup from 2008 (a small remnant is still available here). Currently playlists are a feature within the major music services, and it made me think about whether a stand-alone service built only around playlists is still a relevant request in 2012. Do we have room in our lives for yet another music service? Muxtape was amazing in a pre-Spotify/Rdio world, and I think its simplicity is more relevant than ever.

That said, there is still the question of filtering, search and curation. Now that the content has mostly become free (not free as in $0, free like a bird…a big change since 2001 and even 2008), I am hoping to see a lot of cool advances in the world of music filtering over the next few years.

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  • Brad4rdHay

    check out Songza. :)

  • Levi Jones

    I came across this post recently as I was researching the possibility of creating a mixtape/curation service. Now that it's been about a year, have you become a fan of Songza, other software, or any of the myriad blog mixtapes like Noon Pacific?

  • Levi

    I came across this post recently as I was researching the possibility of creating a mixtape/curation service. Now that it's been about a year, have you become a fan of Songza, other software, or any of the myriad blog mixtapes like Noon Pacific?