By my non-technical calculations, Music was the first entertainment industry to go through the diamond-toothed meatgrinder of sharing technology enabled by the Internet.
I can remember downloading my first MP3 on Napster during my Freshman year of college. I had a brand new Dell desktop and a blazing fast T3 line and I downloaded everything I could. I certainly contributed to the erosion of the industry's primary revenue stream during its creative destruction over the noughties.
During that Lost Decade, however, my taste in music also rapidly evolved from tightly cloistered Grunge and West Coast Rap predilections to discovering a passion for drum and bass, The Flaming Lips, metal, Erik Satie, and other forms of music that I would have never waded into had I not had the access. The Internet made it possible for me to develop my palate and listen to challenging bands and genres I would have never considered had they not been barricaded behind only a paper-thin barrier to entry of a simple search and mouse click.
I never would have arrived at the point I'm at now, in my early thirties, where I spend a healthy chunk of my disposable income going to shows (and traveling to shows), buying Spotify and Sirius subscriptions, spending my funny money on iTunes and Amazon's MP3 storefronts, buying too many Kylesa t-shirts designed by Pushead or John Dyer Baizley.
The music industry as a whole (if not the Big 5) should be thankful that Shawn and Sean decapitated their lazy, bloated model, because Napster helped to forge an army of hardcore, passionate, and informed consumers who are now ready to spend their resources on the industry's multifaceted product offerings. They should be happy that a democratization of news also killed off MTV and Rolling Stone to make way for Pitchfork. That Guitar Hero and video game trailers helped move the promotional model away from radio and TV to the new media. That Youtube became the number one destination for people looking for a Library of Congress of music. That music on a whole became more easily accessible.
But they should also be happy that the destruction of an overly simplistic distribution and promotion model also opened up a million little niches in the music ecosystem. Products that let you experience music in new and different ways. The Labels never would have had the time (or creativity) to create Turntable.fm, or Pandora, or Hype Machine, or Soundtracking, or Root Music, or any of the awesome new products that keep me soaked in music for as many hours of my day that I can stomach.
Longest preamble evar aside, one of the new social music products that I think is awesome, and has a chance at becoming big, is This is My Jam.
Many products, from Last.fm to Blip.fm to Soundtracking, to even Facebook, have tried to become what I'd call a Music Beacon that signaled to your friends and followers what song was blowing up your playlist at that very moment. None of the aforementioned products lasted for me because they weren't designed to the specs that I wanted. TIMJ does what I've always wanted.
It's dead simple to delineate what song you want to broadcast out to your followers. Once the song's been chosen after running a quick search-and-click, a cleanly designed page with an oversized player lies primed and ready to send sexy waveforms to your followers' ear canals. You can easily broadcast your Jam to Facebook and Twitter. You can also follow your friends on TIMJ's site, which scrapes your social accounts and gives you people to follow. You can like songs. And that's about it in terms of the scope of the product.
The magic lies in how the product is designed and in its simplicity. It's easy, clean, and sexy. Which is all I ever wanted. At some point I'd love to have a Spotify app or an iPhone app like Soundtracking that would give me new points of entry into the service, but for now it's easy to update, especially with the super-smart feature of only letting people designate one jam per week. When those seven days are about to run out, you are sent an email reminding you to update your Jam. This is a key mechanism that's gotten me to return to the site every week for the past month to designate my latest Jam.
You should try it out because I'd like to see it take off. If you can't get in, I've dropped off 5 invites in the comment section. First come, first served.
[This is a one-time-only cross-post from Palm Springs Beats, just with better spelling, better images, and a fresh batch of invites.]