sonicsandcastles

As someone who's trying to make music again after 10 years, it's crazy to see how vast the ocean of self released music is. There's so much noise compared to signal, in that so much is easily shared but with less of a focus on a fine tuned production value and presentation. So much just gets posted and lost in a huge void. I've been thinking lately on what an improved experience for music discovery and promotion might look like, from a software solution perspective. What if there were a social music network focused on discovery and promotion, which functioned sort of like Tinder. Everyone in the network contributes to the organic growth of the music of others by quick ratings/reviews. It would be sort of like a random personalized playlist as a standalone application, where you provide a like/dislike as you cycle through various lesser known artists. An artist gradually reaches a level of growth and visibility organically through this sophisticated process of using community ratings and algorithms to distribute music to users in the network per genre preferences, song history, etc. You could sign up as a contributing artist, or just someone interested in newer artists, or even someone willing to patronize or represent an artist. The general idea is that quality music naturally rises to the top, but everyone gets somewhat of fair shake since the system for assigning tracks to users' playlists doesn't look solely or rigidly at artist popularity. The system would select artists currently rising in popularity, as well as artists with no track record whatsoever, all in between, but a good distribution of each. This approach might help make artist discovery and self promotion a fun and gamified experience, and help de-bottlekneck the current collective burden of wading through endless amounts of tracks with little to show for it. Obviously there would need to be rules in place for preventing abuse of the system, but I think something like this could fill a void and encourage artists to really hone their craft and presentation.