Posted December 5th, 2007, in: Technology

Even when I was playing in bands with other human musicians, it was always a really difficult thing to get past -that awkward moment that follows the question: “What kind of music do you guys play?”

Nowadays, in the age of any-one-can-promote-themselves-online-and-build-a-following-yada, there’s a whole new version of the same question. Rather than “what is it like” it’s more like “where do you want people to find it”

Usually it’s on a per-song basis which is nice because you can spread out your positioning.

The nightmare part is this:

The services usually have pre-defined genres. Look at the pic below and tell me which one of these genres I should put one of my recent tracks. Soundtracks & More? Yikes.

What good does this do me or anyone else?

This upload form is from mp3.com

What’s even worse about this is the fact that they don’t even have a link for the category ‘Soundtracks & More” at the top of their pages! May as well call the category “Trash You Don’t Want to Hear Anyway So We Wont Link To It And You Wont Find It”

Sites like this want to do more than just host media files for free. They want to be destinations where music lovers will spend their time clicking around listening to stuff and discovering new music. That’s a pretty ambitious goal (especially considering the superior music discovery tools already available and considering the fact that just down the road, in the realm of the illegal, Major label artists are side-by-side with Independents! With these sharing sites, it’s pretty much only un-signed artists, which creates a pretty high shit-density.)

And the sad thing is, despite the fact that these sharing/discovery sites do open up some possibilities to some Longtail artists, the fact that the sites want to retain traffic causes them to focus their attention on keeping the average joe (whose taste can be statistically determined to be mainstream), not fulfilling the niche demand (thus the limited number of genres and even more limited site navigation). The goal isn’t Longtail as much as thinner cut of the tail. And of course, a complete waste of my time.