One theme of my post about my new musician blog is morphology of musical works. We’re going through a stage where the shape of musical work is changing. There are many new forms competing for attention. For example, there are MP3 review blogs like aurgasm, tightly bound playlist/player combos like Mixwit, loose MP3s stored in the filesystem. Soup Greens‘ position in this landscape has two parts: it suggests that music should be hosted and managed on sites controlled by the musicians, and it suggests that sites controlled by musicians should be a sub-genre of weblogs.
Today I came across a nice variation on the brochure approach at the Cut Copy site. The striking thing about this is the absence of navigational controls. Navigation is limited to scrolling vertically to see what else there is, and most of what you’ll discover by scrolling is in-place within the document. The lack of navigation puts more emphasis on the content and visual design, which is appropriate for a musician site.
If I were expressing a similar idea, I might try it this way:
1. music should be hosted and managed on sites controlled by the musicians
2. sites controlled by musicians need not follow the rigid label/release dynamics of the past
3. sites controlled by musicians need not be elaborate, but can work like weblogs
4. in this vision of creative self-expression,
the blend of words, images, and music is not
a self-conscious form of multi-media, but
a natural expression of creativity
5. the weblogs thus created can be used to market or license music
6. the weblogs thus created may alternatively succeed if there are listeners/readers, regardless of commercial motive
7. the ideal net effect is to “get it” about sharing music in ways that traditional media has not “gotten”.