Curatorial Culture

I've penned a fun, short item in the NY Times' "Arts and Ideas" section's annual list of the most overrated and underrated ideas of the year. It's called "Curatorial Culture," and the general premise is that there's something very intriguing in the idea of being able to sell user-assembled playlists of songs via online stores like Apple's. (Something you can only do with per-song pricing.) Here's the core graph:

What's potentially revolutionary here is the ability to buy a compilation of music handpicked by another individual, as opposed to the official compilations released by record labels. No doubt Apple will soon offer a feature that enables ordinary music fans to create public playlists engineered around every imaginable theme (the post-breakup collection, the happy Nick Drake songs, the underappreciated recordings of Miles Davis) and then sell those compilations via the online store. Historically, the world of commercial music has been divided between musicians and listeners, but there's long been a mostly unrewarded group in the middle: people with great taste in music –– the ones who made that brilliant mix for you in college that you're still listening to. They're curators not creators, brilliant at assembling new combinations of songs rather than generating them from scratch.

This is an idea I've been exploring for almost a decade now, though not always in the context of music. In a way, it was one of the core ideas that drove the argument of my 1997 book, Interface Culture: in a world where everything was just one link away, a whole new class of intermediaries becomes crucial, and those people may even have economic role to play. In Interface Culture I talked about these folks as particularly talented linkers, and of course we now have another word for them: bloggers. It made sense to think that this group would start by building links to other web pages, since that was the first widely-available digital resource. But now that you can build annotated meta-lists of songs, and not just pages, everything that's happened in the blogosphere will happen to music -- only there's a $.99 purchase at the end of the music link, which makes it even more interesting.

Comments

[Anil]

I've been thinking about this in the context of intellectual property law, because the onerous nature of getting clearances for most compliations restricts the number of people who can be curators on behalf of the masses.

This was prompted for me most recently by The Wonder of Stevie, a great collection of Stevie Wonder-penned rarities. I could put together a similar collection, but would have no way of offering it to others without having to manually go and get clearance from dozens of record labels.

Your argument is that playlisting lets me be that curator now, that clearances have been managed by Apple already, but I am somewhat troubled because the playlists are specific to iTunes. This would have more value if the playlists weren't specific to one commerce platform, since I'm somewhat leery of tying my experience and reputation as a curator to one platform, especially when the store owner can apply restrictions to the media at any time.

What I mean is, DJs can make mixtapes or CDs that anyone can use, but I can only make playlists for iTunes or Napster or Walmart, not for everyone. IP law is threatening curatorial culture just as it becomes viable.

[Kevin Marks]

Steve,
this is something I've put a lot of thought into this over the last couple of years too. Being able t compile playlists is part of this, but being able to remix or reperform music is also important. See my discussions at http://mediagora.com

[Andy Baio]

If you haven't already, check out Art of the Mix, a massive database of 65,000+ user-submitted playlists. Just as you suggested, it encompasses every imaginable theme. (It's a shock that they haven't commercialized it at all, such as by linking artists and songs to Amazon-affiliated links.)

[aaron wall]

I just finished reading "The Tipping Point" today...the real problem with music right now is that there is not really a market for it the way there was.

Unlike all other businesses marketing leaders, the RIAA thinks we should pay a premium to buy pre packaged songs in an era of personalization.

The RIAA is too blind to understand that mavens exist, let alone how to extract value from them. I feel their existance will only be acknowledged after most of the value has eroded.

after...The first major artist allows a full free release of all their music from their official website...taking only what donations people feel like offering.

Imagine the marketing power a band that did that with all of their music would have.

I have seen limited promotions for charities, but I wonder how much a band would make if they were smart enough to work free?

[Charlie Uniman]

Isn't this listener-produced playlist idea just a riff on the "booklistings" that Amazoners now post for free on Amazon's site?

[kelton]

"Historically, the world of commercial music has been divided between musicians and listeners, but there's long been a mostly unrewarded group in the middle: people with great taste in music"

=dj's

nice piece, i relate

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[Pete]

I agree with you on all counts. Now wouldn't it be even better if these handpicked playlists pulled in all the other songs (in the universe of songs) matching the sound defined by the playlist and ranked them by relevancy like a search engine? Check out www.soundflavor.com to see where this is just starting to happen.

[oliverw]

Hi all,

Along similar lines, Dave Winer has recently started an aggregation for weblog listings. People can upload (or point to) their News Feed listings (OPML files) and it shows the agregated top 100 of all the members. You can also view by person. It would be interesting to see who has similar feeds to your own and then see the variations (recommendations?). It appears Dave has some experiments in mind for this data...

Find it here: feeds.scripting.com
(Free membership is required)

You can find mine under Oliver Weidlich

[Richard Soderberg]

I've spoken with a few people before about "portable playlists"; that is, playlists that aren't filename-dependent. MusicBrainz, iTunes Music Store links, and Amazon all provide consistent, unique links for music (in Amazon's case, only full albums).

Any of these could be integrated with intelligent playlist software to create mix CDs that can be distributed as a playlist, and then it's your responsibility to make sure you already have the music required to hear the mix (unless you're ripping a CD, in which case you only rip the tracks you don't already have).

Being able to distribute mix playlists to my friends for *free* would destroy the RIAA's profit model for Internet radio: it's perfectly legal to share playlists as long as you don't share the music.

As soon as someone writes up software that understands portable playlists and speaks peer-to-peer filesharing (Acquisition, are you listening?), this will spread like wildfire.

iTunes is in a very strong position for implementing this, using Apple Store links; perhaps a position unique out of all other music stores. It'd only be to their benefit to have mix playlists going over the 'net, instead of mix CDs, since then people would buy individual tracks from the store to flesh out their mixes -- if they want to.

You've touched on one of the trends of the next year or so: separating the presentation of content from the content itself, in the music world. I can't wait to see what'll happen next.

[Stuart H.]

Beyond Northern Iqaq page. Welcome.

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