Mike DiBenedetto dot com

I like few things more than talking about music. In college, I spent ten times more time listening to records and discussing them with friends than I did doing work (sorry Mom and Dad). In my experience, music is inherently social and the experience of consuming it is best when done with others or at the suggestion of others.

Which is why I am so disappointed with the social music offerings on the web. Tons of startups have tried and failed to offer a good experience to music fans like me. But I think they are all getting it wrong from the start. While streaming services and online music lockers are neat, what I really want is a way to bring conversations into my every day listening experience. I want my music to come with meta-data that includes every comment my friends have ever made about that song, that band, that album.  Further, I want my music to come with album and song reviews and historical context.

Here is what I envision: I leave the house with my iPod/iPad/Android/netbook and put on the first Pretenders album.  As it starts, I see that a friend says that Kid is his favorite song.  Another says that the second album is better.  I also read AllMusic.com’s review of the album and I type out that they are reuniting soon.  These comments would be made either online, in iTunes, or on our phones.  That wouldn’t matter.  The important thing is that every song I listened to would have a social context.

This idea could also have commercial implications (besides raising customer captivity for Apple if they embedded this in the iTunes platform) if music publications bundled songs with liner notes and reviews.  In fact, I started thinking about this idea when I left my house this morning and put on the Pitchfork 500 playlist.  I found myself wishing I could read song reviews as I listened to the songs.  That’s something I would pay for. I also find myself unwilling to pay for classical music but if I could buy a classical album that came with liner notes that were embedded into the song so I could read them as I listened on the go, I would definitely shell out a few bucks to expand my musical tastes.

What do you think?  Am I just a total music nerd or would any one else pay for such a service?

Related articles

• The New Era of Music Apps: Subscription Services (readwriteweb.com)
• Sony expands its iTunes rival across Europe (news.cnet.com)
• Music Diary Notes: Spotify Hands-On … Yeah, It IS That Good! (geardiary.com)

During the last few weeks, I have rediscovered my love of blowing hours aimlessly playing the guitar.  And in so doing, I had a thought about how simple technologies are going to create a super class of guitar maestros in the near future.

When I was in high school, I had to learn how to play songs the hard way.  Playing songs on repeat while trying to work out the parts.  Or I would shell out hard-earned cash for sheet music with tabs.  Or most likely I would beg a friend to teach me.  As a result, it was hard for me to build a growing repertoire of songs that were challenging but fun to play.  However, in my most recent phase of music playing, whenever I hear a great song that I’d like to learn, I fire up YouTube and search for “how to play ______ on guitar” and I usually have a number of video tutorials to choose from.  This has made it infinitely easier to learn licks and riffs that I never could figure out on my own.  In the past four weeks, I have gotten better at guitar than I did in the past six years.  That is exciting.  That is disruptive.  And that makes me excited to see what kids who grow up with this infinite supply of free lessons make of it.

Here’s one video that I recently watched while learning how to play Neil Young‘s “The Needle and the Damage Done.”

Needle and the Damage Done Tutorial

My former band, New Idea Society (website by my talented friend Marco Castro) recently released its third album, Somehow Disappearing.  I played on all but two of the songs and being part of the making of this record was a great part of my life while it lasted.  I think it sounds great and am excited it’s finally out.  I hope to get together with the rest of the band and play some shows again soon.

Please take a moment and download it.  Feel free to leave a review.

I have been playing around with 8tracks.com today and I am really digging it.  8tracks.com is a site where you can arrange mixes of 8 or more songs and then share them with friends.

It’s a bit hard to write reviews of legal music services on the web because they are so often hamstrung by their licensing deals from the music labels.  When you think about the hoops that services like Last.fm, Lala.com and 8tracks.com have to jump through to give users a legal and free music experience on the web, it is amazing that any of them can even exist.

While I have often made clear my love of Lala.com (mostly on Twitter but also on this blog), I think I’ll start using 8tracks.com a lot more in the coming days.  But for a very different purpose than I use Lala.   Like most people, I don’t have access to my full music collection at the office.  Lala has helped me get a good portion of it into the cloud for remote listening.  However,  I often find myself streaming music from places like Pandora and Last.fm.  Those sites are pretty good at playing similar music to what I listen to at home.  And they can give you a fairly uninterrupted listening experience for hours on end.   That is fantastic.  Since the mixes on 8tracks.com are often only eight songs long, you typically need to find a new set of songs every half hour.  That might make it hard for 8tracks.com to compete with some of the aforementioned services when it comes to getting people to listen to hours of music at a time.

Where 8tracks blows those competing services out of the water is in social music sharing.  People in my generation grew up making and listening to mixes.  And while we’re somewhat out of the habit, as soon as I started making mixes on the site, I began to love the experience of mix-arranging like a 17 year old in 1998 who just discovered Modest Mouse.  (Yeah, that was me.)  And now that I am creating mixes, I want my friends to listen to them.  8tracks has made mix-making so easy that I want to make a mix for every person I have ever known.  One for my girlfriend.  One for my college roommate.  One for my co-worker.  And since I made the mixes, they are going to listen to them.  Because knowing that I made it for them will make the experience more meaningful than listening to songs picked by a computer program.

Think about this: you have an hour left in the day.  Do you fire up Last.fm or Pandora and type in Pixies to listen to some Pixies-ish rock?  Or do you open the mix I made you and attached with a note saying: “Hey man, remember when we used to jam out to these songs?”  Yeah, thought so.

With that clearly powerful and emotional use-case in mind, I’d plan for it directly if I was in charge.  I would create an option to “Make someone a mix” and make it stand out as distinct from making a general mix.  Furthermore, I’d add a final step to the mix making process in which a user is prompted for the recipient’s email address.  When making a mix is positioned like that, it feels more meaningful than making a mix for the general population who probably don’t care about how I put Pavement right next to a song from my old band.  I’d even make adding a password to these personal mixes optional.  This would make the whole experience more intimate.  I’d focus on intimacy as one of the core values the service delivers.   Along the same line, I’d make it easy for me as a recipient to purchase the whole mix with one click.  While I am hesitant to buy music online in general, I just might spend ten dollars to own every song that my cousin picked out for me on this rainy Wednesday.

Here’s a mix I made of the type of smooth summer sounds that I am slightly embarrassed to like:

I have had my Mac for two years. And I have been playing guitar and bass for fifteen. And while I’m not a programmer or a professional musician, I certainly think about music and technology a lot. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how my own playing and rudimentary songwriting has been influenced by technology. I’m not talking about electronic music here. I’m just talking about how different musical technologies have changed the types of music I write even though I’ve never done more than write guitar and bass parts for very straightforward rock songs. Here are three songs – in the order that I wrote them – that provide a visceral illustration of how my exploration of Apple‘s Garageband has evolved my songwriting. Keep in mind that these are more sketches of songs than real complete works.
1. This brief snippet is a simple chord progression with a few different parts all recorded with the same guitar. None of them have any loops nor any effects. Total simplicity.

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2. This song shows me learning how to add electronic sounds to approximate other instruments that I didn’t have laying around, such as drums and organs. However, all the guitar sounds I used had no effects on them.

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3. This song snippet is me going nuts. It’s very layered with weird sounds but every single sound (except for the drum loop) was created by an acoustic guitar and then sent through some sort of effect processor.

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I can only imagine the strange sounds and songs I’ll be writing in the coming months.