Community Music part 1: Foafing-the-Music

I have evangelized about Last.fm for some time now, and am still an avid fan of scrobbling tracks to help refine their music recommendation database. Hence I present to you a several part series on Community Music. There are other programs worth their salt deserving your attention, if you like finding the music you never knew you loved.

FOAF

Foafing-the-Music, created by "Grup de Recerca en Tecnologia Musical, MTG", comprised of a group of over 40 researchers from diverse disciplines at the "Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions i de l’Institut Universitari de l’Audiovisual de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra"

Stated on the site (with a little translation by yours truly) "The group's prime objective is to find the balance between basic and applied investigation and at the same time, to promote an interdisciplinary investigation that incorporates both scientific/technological and humanitarian/artistic origins."

(Imagine that, there is an English link.) "The MTG was created in 1994 by its current director, Dr. Xavier Serra, as one of the research groups of the Audiovisual Institute, a centre for interdisciplinary research in the different areas of Digital Media."

The initiation ritual is the usual. Pick a sign-in name, password, and then add your affiliations (Last.fm, Blogger, Facebook) After a couple days we shall soon see if this foafing thing works out in the next part of the series. The foafers promise to provide links to the following:

- similar artists,
- new music releases from iTunes, Amazon, Yahoo
- album reviews
- mp3 download locations
- podcasts
- automatic playlists
- incoming concerts

all relevant to my taste

However, as I begin to wait for the program to do its magic, I must admit that Last.fm already does all these functions when you take into account user posted dj sets, and concert information.

New Medium Music

I found an interesting analysis by Calvin K.M. Lam and Bernard C.Y. Tan, titled: The Internet is Changing the Music Industry, beating the dead horse, I know.

However, there are many people that know only what the mainstream media has promoted, usually in the form of a good guy vs. bad guy deal.

It is only 7 pages long for the impatient ones out there, but this is not the kind of story that can be compressed into a seven second soundbyte. This is my favorite quote:

"What is more worrisome to the music industry is not the advent of MP3 or copyright issues but the emergence of a new Internet distribution channel, dictated by consumers."