Monday, February 9, 2009

How do you discover new music? Baratunde wants to know.

Baratunde Thurston is either known for his work for The Onion, or for his participation in Barack Obama's presidential campaign. But he has other interests.

Over the weekend, he asked his Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed friends to answer the question "Where do you find new music?" I missed the question, but 76 people didn't. Baratunde posted the overall results in his blog, along with his ruminations. Here's an excerpt from the ruminations:

I’ve been thinking on all this and realize that our technology has dismantled the former aggregation model for music. We used to have record labels, radio stations, music reviews and sage wisdom from record store clerks (and our friends) to help us make sense of the world by limiting, vetting, categorizing or explaining the wide world of music. Now, we have new points of aggregation: our iPods/iTunes and various other online services. We’ve dismantled the old world, but the new one is still under construction.

On first thought, I don't know if the model has been dismantled, or whether we've just rearranged the players. Instead of relying on the wisdom of the Tower Records clerk, I now rely on Steven Hodson's last.fm playlist. And while Clear Channel doesn't run di.fm, somebody does.

Thoughts?
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