From Napster onward, music has become a vast Schumpeterian mosh pit of legally dubious digital disintermediation, quick adjustments of economic models, and new leaps forward (or backward, if you’re the hapless music label, watching your intellectual property propagating, royalty-free, throughout the Web). Hype Machine operates in a legal gray zone: it doesn’t technically have the rights to play this music, but argues that it is simply pointing interested listeners toward bloggers who post links to MP3s, themselves mostly operating in their own legal gray areas. Clicking on “read blog post,” I was taken to a blog named “ill-ec-tro-nic” that told me more about the track and others like it-plus where to buy it. Now it’s playing an electro-tastic Modeselektor remix of “Dial Zero” by My Robot Friend.
I just heard a new Neil Young track segue into an awesome club banger by a rapper named Milano. It’s a simple Web-based application that sucks songs mentioned in music blogs into an Internet radio stream. As I’m writing this, I’m playing a Flash-based MP3 blog extractor called Hype Machine. Most of us are only now starting to unlock the potential of our iPods, but the pace of change in the digital-music sphere is such that even the pleasures of spinning the wheels on our nanos will soon seem old hat. Where once my only options were CDs and radio, I can now deploy a battery of devices, platforms, and formats to enjoy the music I already own and to find more. These are vertiginous, thrilling times for music fans. Having it recommended to me was a goosebump-inducing moment-and a neat demonstration for me of why social media is sweeping the Web: There are other people out there who feel this as deeply as I do! Maybe we can all get together and achieve a higher unity! But both albums are on my mental top-ten-of-all-time list, and I had flattered myself that only I saw the cosmic linkages between the two albums’ mystico-religious sound washes, rave-ups, and idiosyncratic lyricism. Take my word: it sounds only marginally like anything by the Stone Roses. NMH’s 1998 In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a wildly over-the-top cult masterpiece, an operatic song cycle that probes the mystical import of the fate of Anne Frank and other tragedies. Instead, I was kicked back Neutral Milk Hotel, an Athens, Georgia–based collective centered around an artist named Jeff Mangum. So I keyed in Stone Roses, expecting to hear the similar- sounding Charlatans UK or Kasabian, a current Roses-ish group. I’d long felt a profound sense of loss over the demise of the Mancunian band the Stone Roses, whose eponymous 1989 album raised rave-y Britpop to the level of sacrament. And Last.fm, if you let it, will track what music you’re listening to and connect you to people who like similar music, a hallmark of “social media” or “Web 2.0” sites. Last.fm takes the simpler tack of grouping music by what other listeners like-so if, for example, you key in the Austin, Texas, band Spoon, you’ll be told what other Spoon fans on Last.fm are into. Pandora is, of course, correct that Grandaddy basically is Air Supply in indie drag, but an online seeker wants affirmation, not critique.
It’s a cool idea, but the biology-based approach to music listening can turn into a farcical mashup of styles, in which a request for something similar to Grandaddy (a gentle, incontestably credible alt-rock band from Modesto, California) yielded me music that sounded like easy-listening classics from the 1970s.
Pandora is a wonderfully intuitive but only intermittently successful experiment in applying a “genome” metaphor to music: it breaks down hundreds of thousands of songs to their constituent elements-rhythm, melody, tempo, and so forth.
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