Just what helps us..

A wealth of choice

Social media is a huge growth area, and has been for a number of years, especially where music is concerned.MySpace is a phenomenally popular network, with over 50 million users. Social recommendation systems—the filtering of data to present likely items of interest—now attract a massive amount of attention, with the likes of Last.fm, iTunes, and even Amazon promising to automatically find us new music we will love. 

I stumbled upon this brilliant little article today and have just forwarded it by mail and dumped into my second brain to let all the smarties I know read it as well.. the entire article can be found here.

Maybe the reason for me to embrace this article is the sad fact that I watched Lydverket last night.. (I did not Love Mona B.Riise, but hey.. she thought me about new music and made me discover..) Last night was, to my great fascination and despair, dedicated to us, the viewers, by them and us.. Lydverket had gone ahead and asked the viewers what they(we) wanted to see. Its not that I don’t like Oasis, but it was just to frikkin obvious that it was gonna turn up as “something the public want”

Dear everyone: collectively you are not smart enough to entertain me! If anyone can like something, it is spent, used or plain %#* BLAND. -I like harsh people with opinions I can either hate or love. Disappointingly, social democracy has its drawbacks when people in general are the wrong kind of crowd. ..and to rephrase what I said earlier: I like people, but I value new opinions. So, dear Lydverket, and anyone else.. Please start recognizing (and valuing) that some people have actual brains inside.

-Top of the pops/ top 20 and anything else marked “most popular”, might be a clue but should not be the norm in every case. I need new channels now. 

Please. Enlighten me again. I want to learn new things.

..and why on earth is it any good?

As one of our lovely ginny pigs stated :   music = identity. 

Personally I love sneaking around in peoples library to look at their music taste and determine if I like them or not, or even discover new dimensions to people I had placed in a labeled boxes a long time ago. (I love love loved it when my mac started to speak with other macs around my classroom (and nearby) some years ago, displaying great music from people “all over”.

Even though, as Jørn pointed out; we’re embrasing the kliché. Especially when expanding our service to also be a tool within shops and cafes. (imagine, taking a bit of H&M with you on your mobile when you leave the store.. or getting the mobile playlist from Outsidelands festival back in August. (-Dude, I like payed to get in..) 

or looking at your phone and realize that your all alone? that there’s no-one around you who share the interest for music, vs. seeing five or seven other public personal music-lists for instance in the same cable-car.. ..Finding a person with an awesome list and looking around you to see who it might be? Dating some one and discovering you have no common taste, but that the music that person carry around really inspires you, even though you thought you couldn’t possibly like shoegazer-trance or drum’n base stuff.

I think it’d be nice with some more context in the way we discover new music. Having the people around us as music beacons rather than being pumped full of the same same but different-music scrobbled towards us by the taste of people almost exactly identical to one self.

 

(..just a thought.)

Hey kid, wheres your blog updates?!

ok. long time no see.

There are two projects that we are working on right now. one of them is for Vålerenga football club, the other one is for Telenor music service, and we have been through several exiting stages already. This is a short sum-up:

1. Brief and getting divided into two teams (both working with both projects.) 

2. A couple of days discussing and workshopping with Jack Shultze & Matt Webb in London.

3. Deciding on direction/ picking out which ideas we liked the most. 

4. Developing a paper-prototype of the concept. 

5. Testing it on people provided by Sintef and Living Lab and examining the results.

 

1.  Telenors current music service is a transaction based store with little content beyond the actual purchase of music. It has a customer base of ca. 300.000 users, though only 30.000 visit on a monthly basis. The brief is to design a service that moves away from the transaction based store of today, to a portal -integrated with the mobile phone- based on richer experiences related to music.

2. Discussion, workshop & ideation with Shultze & Webb. :Lots of concepts generated from looking at both music and football-matches as social objects and looking at consequences such as social serendipity and rituals emerging from these concepts. -A delightful train of thought for someone infatuated by social anthropology and people in general. 

3. Back in Oslo, processing the ideas developed in London, we redesigned the concepts (yet again) to generate multi-touchpoint services. As for Telenor this ment:

Creating a bluetooth based listening service for people with mobile phones, enabling browsing  of shared music lists / libraries and playing this content as if it was a personal radio-station, as long as one is physically near each other. (i.e. near the source.) A chance to buy the music others have in their libraries from Telenor, if you like what you listen to. 

Our conceptual monetization model: browse, discover, play (like/dislike) buy instantly or save in wish-list / shopping-chart to buy later. In order to sell more music, we believe there has to be more of a hype and openness regarding the content, promoting the part of collecting tunes your self, and finding interesting new music by social or physical ties. 

4. Developing steps for browsing public playlists from both people and places, landed us on several different scenarios. (user-other people/ user-Telenor / user-places / user-events.)

5. Testing our concept on 4 lovely people, provided by Sinteff, with our paper-prototype, we found several social consequences and different wants/needs connected to our people surfing concept:

Guy nr1, age 19 (the super user) early adaptor. 

Guy nr2, age 21 early adaptor 

Girl nr1, age 25 late majority

Girl nr2, age 26 the laggard 

4 out of 4 responded that music was extremely important to them, yet the level of knowledge and consciousness differed tremendously.

4 out of 4 stated that they clarely understood the way of how to use the product, though one did not know what bluetooth was, neighter how it worked or if she had it on her mobile.

1 out of 4 felt that music had so much to do with identity, that if he saw a beautiful girl, but found that she listened to tasteless music, he wouldn’t bother to go to any lengths to get to know her better. He also stated that if he found a really interesting playlist or library, he would automaticly like that person, wether he knew it or not.

4 out of 4 was positive to sharing music, but 2 out of 4 wanted to have more secure areas that should not be available to the public. 1 wanted it because of the exclusiveness he felt when having found something truly amazing, the other one had a strong feeling of need to hide behind a nickname, because of her taste in music.

3 out of 4 responded with enthusiasm to the concept.

 

Looking at what we found, one possible way of avoiding problems related to privacy might be to have open and password-based folders for your music. An other issue we’re encountering now is that peoples mobiles, though set to discoverable are not really descriptive for the content gathered in the list. (a detail I’m ignoring right now..)

Guerilla Marketing

Tiny sticker-ads for tiny bands who make great sounds.

People can download your music to their mobile by sending a sms with your songs code in, to NRK Urørts number, download it and get to hear the almost song instantly. Throw’em up where ever you like, (preferabely where people with mobile phones hang around) ..just don’t get caught. 

In order to get such fancy stickers, thou need only to upload a song to Urørt and simply ask if you can have some sticers, to run around and bomb the town with. I’d place mine next to a bus-stop or a nightclub or something like that.  

-have fun kids.

Finishing up Urørt

NRK/untouched/redesign

This is a paper I wrote as to sum up and conclude on what I found while re-designing and trying to tidy up the Urørt project from earlier this fall. It was executed in relation to the RECORD project at AHO as part of the Social media course.