Music Web 2.0

I’m a fingerstyle guitar enthusiast! So much so that I volunteer to write the Toronto Fingerstyle Guitar weekly newsletter. I’ll post my articles here for your musical pleasure. Be sure to check us out online at http://www.fingerstyleguitar.ca

A few weeks ago, we announced that 8 TFGA interviews were available as podcasts (http://www.noisytrade.com/podcast.xml & http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=266803416) and it got me thinking about the web 2.0 revolution. I’ll admit, I’m an internet junkie so I’m always on the bleeding edge of all things WWW. Web 2.0 is a trend which aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing and collaboration among internet users. Sites like MySpace & Facebook & Wikipedia are web 2.0.

Whether you’ve used these sites or not, one thing is common among them - you control the content you want to see and you participate in the content that’s published. Wikipedia, for example, is an online encyclopedia based on the unlikely notion that an entry can be added by any web user, and edited by any other.

So when Dave posted those podcasts a few weeks ago, it got me thinking: has music been affected by web 2.0? After all, web 2.0 is defined as a collaborative medium and what’s more collaborative than music?

Music was probably the first type of media to really go web 2.0. Even before MySpace and YouTube, we had Napster which allowed users to share their music files.

Then MySpace evolved as a platform for musicians to publish profiles about their bands and post music to be shared. While there are many business owners on MySpace now, it is still largely a musical space (check out the TFGA MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/torontofingerstyleguitar)
Moving beyond MySpace, there are a host of other sites which make up the new web category of “Social Music.” I’ve been playing with them for a few weeks and what I love is being able to discover related artists who play music similar to the artists I already love. And because many of these sites allow you to publish your own content & vote on songs, I’m able to share the music I like with others. Imagine taking the Internet by storm by sharing everything fingerstyle!

If you want to check out the Social Music revolution for yourself, here are some of the sites I’ve been playing with:

http://www.last.fm/

http://mog.com/

http://www.ijigg.com/

Happy listening!