May 18, 2009

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Real Time Music Discovery from Friends

I like listening to music.  With the proliferation of options for streaming music and online radio, I find that I listen to a lot of different music each week while sitting at my desk.


While I enjoy music, I’m hardly a “new music” aficionado - any skills I can claim are likely in the ability to quote old Beatles lyrics.  I’ll always love the classics, yet in the last year or so I’ve found myself getting more and more into discovering new music (with the caveat that this music may or may not be “new”…only new to me!)

I often “discover” this new music by asking a few friends who take the time to stay in the know.  This keeps me somewhat up to speed, and combined with services like Hype Machine and Pandora, has helped me to get a better feel of emerging artists I like.

Today I opened up with a little music / social media experiment instead of relying on my few “music agents”, I sent out a Twitter message around 2:30pm:

Who should I be listening to this week as I spend a lot of time at my desk? Open to anything, in the mood for music discovery


This tweet went out to 100+ Twitter followers as well as to my friends on Facebook as a status update.  Thirty minutes later I had 4 new music suggestions via Facebook.  After another 30 minutes I had 3 more suggestions via Twitter.  Now a full 2 hours since my original tweet, I’ve received another 2 suggestions. 

Two hours, nine different people with suggestions, hours of unique music from different artists to check out this week.

That’s the power of the social web, of real-time suggestive discovery from a group of trusted parties from varying branches of my personal network.  That’s powerful stuff.

To everyone who responded, thanks for the suggestions!  I’m working my way through all of them and have quite a bit of listening for the week!  Below is the aggregated list for anyone who’s interested:

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