So, last time around I alluded to a new project that M+C is taking on, and I’m very excited to announce its’ imminent launch. My friends (and maybe some colleagues) know that I’m very passionate about music – have been since I was in high school. People in my generation have had a rough go of it, musically. We came of age in the 1980s – which in retrospect had some kickass music – and while our parents essentially had two choices about how to listen to music (vinyl and radio), my generation has had to endure all sorts of changes in music formats. Think about it: in the time between my adolescence and now (roughly 20 years, say) I’ve listened to music on vinyl, cassettes, CDs and MiniDiscs, iPods, iPhones, Zunes and through tinny PC speakers. The simple mixtape started as a recordable cassette, and then it was on to trading minidiscs, then CDRs. Moving that music around – trading it amongst connoisseur friends – has been even more complicated. CDRs, then FTP sites (which were a revelation at the time), then file sharing, then back to FTP sites to dodge the RIAA, then Instant Messaging, then emailing attachments, then YouSendIt links… on and on and on. I believe that we’re at the stage now where only the most die-hard fans / connoisseurs will invest time to find music that interests them – most everyone else just gets pushed content from the radio, or TV or wherever – and there’s not much discovery involved.
That’s saying nothing of the format of the music. For most people, the solution is just a passive compromise. Terrestrial radio listening and a bit of curiosity lands them at iTunes or maybe at the shrinking CD section at Best Buy or Wal-Mart, and off they go. For me, the solution is high bitrate mp3s, played via my Airport Express through my stereo. CDs and DVDs have become collector’s items, things to open carefully, rip digitally, then carefully place on the shelf to add gravitas to my home.
And that’s fine. For those of us more curious about what’s outside of terrestrial radio and the Billboard chart, life’s an adventure, and there’s always some new platform to learn – first it was Napster, then Limewire, then Kazaa (remember that?) and God knows what else. My friend George put it well recently, when he said “new music seems to travel well based on who’s online now.”
Think about that. For me and my friends who are serious about finding new music – really avid consumers of music – it’s possible to miss out on what George thinks is interesting, just because I’m not around when he chooses to share it. With so much clutter and so much media out there to consume, I think there are two choices:
1) Submit to information overload and become myopic in how you receive music. Pandora’s a great example of this. It’s a wonderful service, and will actually recommend music to you based on what you’re listening to now, and what you’ve listened to in the past. Algorithms are wonderful things, but they seem very, very impersonal to me. I already find it creepy that GMail feeds me contextual ads based on the content of my email account – I don’t know that I want a robot telling me what’s awesome, musically.
2) Get music from your friends. I trust my friends’ taste, because we tend to have similar tastes. I believe that taking advice from my friends means that I get a really good filter on what’s out there. I might never have heard of spaz-rockers extraordinaire Lightning Bolt if not for my friend Matt, and that’s a shame.
The solution, I think, is one my friend Eddie Aten came up with: why not develop a method to share music easily, ubiquitously, and using an existing communication platform? By learning lessons from the ongoing RIAA madness (see: the Muxtape debacle), listening to feedback from fellow music fans and consumers and learning a bit about actual buying habits of consumers, we’re developing a system that we believe is the best of all worlds. For music fans. For musicians. For labels. To encourage promotion of interesting music, by real people, and to encourage people to listen to their friends.
Announcing Swift.fm
Swift.fm is, at the heart of the matter, a free service that lets users leverage Twitter to create infinite playlists. Leveraging the simplicity and ubiquity of Twitter, Swift.fm lets users build playlists of what they think is interesting, and perhaps more importantly, instantly find out what their friends are listening to.
To use the service, all that’s required is to log into http://swift.fm/login using your existing Twitter credentials; the system automatically looks for people you’re following on Twitter and loads the last 30 days’ worth of posts (or, “swifts”) they’ve made. Thus, instant playlists, programmed by your friends, not robots.
To post a song, users are tweet from ANY Twitter app (i.e. TweetBerry, TweetDeck, Twitter.com) using three bits of information: 1) song description, 2) a working .mp3 link and 3) the tag “@swiftfm”. At http://swift.fm, users can search for existing .mp3s on the internet, or upload a song directly to the system, then use the familiar Twitter text box and text counter to stay within the 140-character limit. That’s it. Simple.
To listen to the playlists of folks you’re following on Twitter, just go to http://swift.fm/USERNAME , or click the username from any individual post you see. We’re working on a design update that automatically shows you links for your Twitter friends’ playlists, too, for ease of browsing.
Swift.fm is currently in what we’re calling “soft” beta, and we’re asking our friends and colleagues to log in and give it a shot. There are a ton of features in the development pipeline, but we’re happy to take all the feedback we can get.
The Future
Apart from being what we think as a really useful tool for aficionados of music to learn what their friends think is cool, we see Swift.fm as something that record labels, musicians, music bloggers and media outlets can use to quickly, simply promote or discuss their recent finds. The specter for me of getting some of my favorite artists to use Swift.fm is not only cool from a professional / I’d-be-proud-of-that perspective, but I’m genuinely interested to know what Milosh or Dabrye or Thom Yorke or Jamie Lidell has on blast at present.
Dreaming a dream, what if some prolific Twitterers started using Swift? I mean, anyone who follows @lancearmstrong knows that he listens to a lot of “americana”, but wouldn’t it be cooler if his followers were able to click a link and listen a playlist that he uses to cool out after a stage of the Tour de France? Or, wouldn’t it be awesome if @THE_REAL_SHAQ posted links to hip hop songs he’d guest MCed on? I can think of one specifically awesome Fu-Schnickens song that he’d be obligated to Swift – you can check that out here.
M+C’s role in Swift.fm is to help the company figure out its promotional way forward, to evangelize the service, and to get bloggers, musicians, labels and regular joes to use the service. It’s a rough job to have to listen to lots and lots of killer music, but I’ve got 500 watts and an Energy ESW-V10 Subwoofer to help me cope. I have more than a thousand albums, an open mind about music, and a big desire to hear what’s next and mindblowing.
So, please check it out and give us some constructive criticism by emailing us here. Or, if you’re a jerk, just regular criticism. We need all the help we can get.
Oh yeah, and to hear what’s been on my stereo lately, check out: http://www.swift.fm/shane_mahoney/
That is all.