Music Blogging in the Age Of Too Many Ice Cream Flavors In a continuation of the fascinating interview of Sean Adams of “Drowned in Sound,” and Doug Freeman’s column, both in Evolver.Fm about the end of music blogging as we know it, I want to suggest my 23.4 cents on the subject of music blogging these days – consumption and distribution. At some point about ten years ago,  many people who felt they had something to say about music finally had the chance to say it, and  started a music blog. Some of them got super-famous and popular (the 0.0000001%) and most of the others had to gather their readers one by one (the other 99.9999999%). That was and is a problem;  how do you reach the best potential readers for your posts, the actual listeners of the music referenced  in the posts? Listeners faced the same problem, but from another perspective. They encountered the too many ice cream flavors problem. Think about it…when you go to an ice cream parlor and you have four flavors to choose from, you’ll feel confident with your pick, chocolate and vanilla.  But if you’d go to a store with 40 flavors, you’ll end up staring at the glass, unable to pick and then one of three scenarios might occur: First, you might think about the flavor dilemma for two long minutes before you’d be brave enough to check out the flavor you haven’t tried yet. This is the unlikely option and I’d give it a 5% chance.  Second, you can think about it for two minutes, and end up with the same flavor you had in mind in the first place – chocolate vanilla. You’d probably mumble something to your friend or to the ice cream guy, about how you couldn’t make up your mind. I’d give this 65%.  The third option is that after two minutes, you leave when it ‘suddenly’ occurs to you that you don’t want ice cream. Don’t be confused; you were into it before entering the store, and now it’s no longer a desire. The abundance confused you. I’d give this scenario 30%.   Now if you’re a music listener, and you want to read some interesting stuff about, let’s say, the new Engelbert Humperdinck song, unless you noticed that one of the blogs you’re following via RSS/Facebook/Twitter/Mail/Message-In-a-Bottle has posted about it – you’d have to use that website everyone else is using, Google. And then it’s a WORLD of ice cream flavors, and what happens next? You automatically lose interest; the amount of info out there is way too much to digest and like every woman will confirm – after you try three perfumes in the store, all fragrances seem similar. So you’ve got bloggers who can’t reach a new audience because they’re one pistachio flavor out of the 10,000,000 flavors out there, and on the other hand you’ve got hungry ice cream fans.Furthermore, people often browse the internet on mobile, while they are waiting at the doctor’s/sitting in a train/lying in the park/enter-your-leisure-time-activity-here. It’s the same time that they’ll listen to music on their mobile. The procedure is simple, they’ll press play on the new Engelbert Humperdinck song, and then they’ll go and do something else, because obviously, what else CAN be done with the boring music player?     What we do at iAlbums is offer a meeting place for artists, listeners and bloggers/websites. Right now we live in iOs, but soon we’ll be moving into  other neighborhoods as well. We created the iAlbums feed, a semantically analyzed collection of items that is selected according to what the user is listening to at any particular moment. In the feed, we embed bios, album reviews, pictures, videos, merch, tweets and Facebook updates from the artists’ profiles, and blog posts. That way, bloggers can feature their post in the feed and be exposed to hundreds of thousands of listeners who won’t have to search for anything on the web. They just click the play button and BAM – content is coming to them directly at the most valuable point – while listening. With iAlbums, the listeners get a super-enhanced experience, bloggers get wider exposure and everybody wins.   Here’s a sketch of how it works, ridiculously easy. Personally, I don’t agree with Doug Freeman and don’t think music blogging is dead. I  believe that the Spotify playlist can function well as a brilliant and immediate recommendation system. But people still like to write about their passion for music, while others like to read about it, so there is still a need for blogs, but there’s a shift that needs to take place in both the means of consumption and distribution; they must be tied to the listening experience, in order to be meaningful and meet the ever-growing demand for one-click-satisfaction.  This synergy is perfectly done with iAlbums. Bloggers who want to feature their posts in iAlbums - We’ll open the back office for bloggers shortly, please fill in your details here and we’ll get in touch soon Yair Yona  

Music Blogging in the Age Of Too Many Ice Cream Flavors

In a continuation of the fascinating interview of Sean Adams of “Drowned in Sound,” and Doug Freeman’s column, both in Evolver.Fm about the end of music blogging as we know it, I want to suggest my 23.4 cents on the subject of music blogging these days – consumption and distribution.

At some point about ten years ago,  many people who felt they had something to say about music finally had the chance to say it, and  started a music blog. Some of them got super-famous and popular (the 0.0000001%) and most of the others

had to gather their readers one by one (the other 99.9999999%). That was and is a problem;  how do you reach the best potential readers for your posts, the actual listeners of the music referenced  in the posts?

Listeners faced the same problem, but from another perspective. They encountered the too many ice cream flavors problem.

Think about it…when you go to an ice cream parlor and you have four flavors to choose from, you’ll feel confident with your pick, chocolate and vanilla. 

But if you’d go to a store with 40 flavors, you’ll end up staring at the glass, unable to pick and then one of three scenarios might occur:

  • First, you might think about the flavor dilemma for two long minutes before you’d be brave enough to check out the flavor you haven’t tried yet. This is the unlikely option and I’d give it a 5% chance.
     
  • Second, you can think about it for two minutes, and end up with the same flavor you had in mind in the first place – chocolate vanilla. You’d probably mumble something to your friend or to the ice cream guy, about how you couldn’t make up your mind. I’d give this 65%.
     
  • The third option is that after two minutes, you leave when it ‘suddenly’ occurs to you that you don’t want ice cream. Don’t be confused; you were into it before entering the store, and now it’s no longer a desire. The abundance confused you. I’d give this scenario 30%.

 

Now if you’re a music listener, and you want to read some interesting stuff about, let’s say, the new Engelbert Humperdinck song, unless you noticed that one of the blogs you’re following via RSS/Facebook/Twitter/Mail/Message-In-a-Bottle has posted about it – you’d have to use that website everyone else is using, Google.
And then it’s a WORLD of ice cream flavors, and what happens next?
You automatically lose interest; the amount of info out there is way too much to digest and like every woman will confirm – after you try three perfumes in the store, all fragrances seem similar.

So you’ve got bloggers who can’t reach a new audience because they’re one pistachio flavor out of the 10,000,000 flavors out there, and on the other hand you’ve got hungry ice cream fans.
Furthermore, people often browse the internet on mobile, while they are waiting at the doctor’s/sitting in a train/lying in the park/enter-your-leisure-time-activity-here. It’s the same time that they’ll listen to music on their mobile. The procedure is simple, they’ll press play on the new Engelbert Humperdinck song, and then they’ll go and do something else, because obviously, what else CAN be done with the boring music player?

 

 

What we do at iAlbums is offer a meeting place for artists, listeners and bloggers/websites. Right now we live in iOs, but soon we’ll be moving into  other neighborhoods as well.
We created the iAlbums feed, a semantically analyzed collection of items that is selected according to what the user is listening to at any particular moment.

In the feed, we embed bios, album reviews, pictures, videos, merch, tweets and Facebook updates from the artists’ profiles, and blog posts. That way, bloggers can feature their post in the feed and be exposed to hundreds of thousands of listeners who won’t have to search for anything on the web. They just click the play button and BAM – content is coming to them directly at the most valuable point – while listening.
With iAlbums, the listeners get a super-enhanced experience, bloggers get wider exposure and everybody wins.  

Here’s a sketch of how it works, ridiculously easy.


Personally, I don’t agree with Doug Freeman and don’t think music blogging is dead. I  believe that the Spotify playlist can function well as a brilliant and immediate recommendation system. But people still like to write about their passion for music, while others like to read about it, so there is still a need for blogs, but there’s a shift that needs to take place in both the means of consumption and distribution; they must be tied to the listening experience, in order to be meaningful and meet the ever-growing demand for one-click-satisfaction.  This synergy is perfectly done with iAlbums.

Bloggers who want to feature their posts in iAlbums - We’ll open the back office for bloggers shortly, please fill in your details here and we’ll get in touch soon


Yair Yona

 

1 year ago