From: Jessica Murray <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
To: Jonathan Jaeger <hypedsoundteam@gmail.com>
hi.
i'm sure some people will find this appealing. personally, though, i like the idea of presenting my music differently across platforms. i don't currently have any presentation needs that i feel are unmet by a facebook/youtube/bandcamp combination. my concerns are more to do with finding a way to reach the right audience.
i realize you probably didn't actually listen to anything. if you did, you'd realize that, as an artist, my primary need would be the creation of an internet space that is truly focused upon creative music, rather than fashions or trends or genres or the biases of the site mods. i need something that focuses on substance, not hype. it's probably not a coincidence that i feel i have the same problem as a consumer. the internet was supposed to make it easier to get through the hype; instead, we now have 300 websites acting the way mtv & radio used to, drowning everything out. that would be a shift to a comparable market if it weren't for the fact that the filters on the bottom have been ignored and have consequently lapsed into disuse. trying to find interesting experimental music on the internet is very difficult due to the oversaturation of the market on centralized sites like bandcamp.
the nature of my music makes it hard for me to market it as anything other than "different", which makes it hard to get picked up. sites that appeal to specific genres are going to universally reject it because it doesn't fit neatly into any genre (and will not appeal to the listener base). the nature of review sites is that they're constantly competing with each other for the ability to find the most pure representations of specific abstractions. i just don't exist in that kind of a market.
that is to say that i don't think another general music site is something that will be beneficial to struggling artists, or to consumers that listen to struggling artists. it just promises to further separate and saturate the market into "officially chosen trend" and "everything else". one giant database is not going to help me or people like me - rather, it's small and disconnected databases that appeal to specific audiences that are going to help unique artists connect with their difficult to define listening bases.
that's a role that needs to be taken up by a vibrant blog community, which can only happen outside of any corporate oversight. in economic terms, it's letting the market function rather than trying to control it through centralizing lists, trends and things of the like.
what something like this might be useful for is a listener of mainstream music that wants to connect with artists that they've heard elsewhere. those artists would have a reason to follow their audience to where they congregate. for the rest of us, it might even serve to reduce clutter.
i don't, however, think it's something that interests me at this time. what i need is something closer to a social media version of brainwashed.com.
j
