How about doing to Music what we have done to Social Media. I am thinking of a GV Music where authors/editors can publish reviews for underground bands from their countries, not only reviews, but we can also integrate SoundCloud (or YouTube) in there and publish those music. I am focusing on underground music here, coz on one hand they need publicity, compared to mainstream music they are what blog are compared to MSM. Also, most probably those artists will be releasing their music under copyleftist licenses. We can also do interviews with musicians, compilation for new releases, etc.
Well, it’s just a crazy idea, but why not explore new fields we aren’t into and see how things will develop?
Hi Tarek,
I like this idea. In addition to interviews we could also collect sometimes songs released under CC license in our countries. I think it could be a great promotion of changing the copyright regime. I would also go for integrating or somehow using http://hypem.com/ because they make lists of the most tweeted/blogged songs.
GV Underground! I’d like to hear music with good “social” lyrics…
Hey Tarek! 🙂
I always wanted to do something about music with GV, since the summit actually… 🙂 But my initial idea was a collaborative map, what do you think about that? We could make this like suggestions from translators and authors and make the “underground cut”, although it’s very difficult to define what’s underground in every country. But it could also be like an “emotional map”, with tips from our collaborators from all around the world, like “the world is singing, are you listening?” 😛
I think a collaborative map is a simple thing to do and it gets rich in content if you allow people to put youtube links, blog links or even only an abstract, it’s easy for everyone to add things and it gets very informative very quickly.
Let me know if something like this goes through! 🙂
cheers
Debb
That sounds pretty nice!
Watched “Microphone” recently, huh? 😉
Great idea!
I support this idea as I believe underground music is also a good way to spread messages that hardly would be broadcasted via mainstream media. Music, as blogs, are a good opportunity to get in touch with other worlds, there are many many blogs dedicated to try and explain a bit the inspiration behind the tunes, many songs have very interesting stories behind them… Blogs and music, what a great application that would be Tarek!
In addition to “MIcrophone”, let´s add “No One Knows about Persian Cats” and we start building our network of sources 🙂 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_One_Knows_About_Persian_Cats
One more thing: when I search for music, I generally try to search for locations, but I lack the knowledge of a system that could allow me to discover music based on cathegories other than artist, band, label, genre (rock, blues, dubstep… not enough for me). In this sense, various tags could all be set in the system design so that searching for music could lead you to something else: for instance, when looking for Iranian music, as I mentioned above the ˜persian cats”movie soundtrack, the user could be led to a page with results that could range from the map Debora mentioned, to the music available and GV posts related to the region. Plus: sometimes I want to listen to the sounds of Praha, but I don’t know how exactly to get them. I’d love to know how indie rock does sound in Moscow, but I don’t know how. I want to listen to the sounds that amuse people in Moçambique but I don’t know how. Or I may want to listen to some song that reflects an specific mood, or talks about some specific subject (e.g. “protest”, “citizenship”) or doesn’t talk about anything at all, is purely instrumental, but based on a given context that we should learn about so that we can understand better why that music was written that way. Well, many are the examples, such a system should take into consideration alternative ways to music tagging, creating a whole new environment for music discovery and sharing (with GV mission lying behind all this). 🙂 good luck, Tarek!
Go Tarek, go! I promise to participate and help 🙂
soundmood.com has a very interesting way of organizing things and it works through blog content, which in our case looks very “logic”. Not saying we could make a soundmood, but maybe the way they work their content and keyword system might be inspiring. Also about location, that’s why I always wanted to make a Lusophone map of music, because it’s very hard to find info on Lusophone artists other than Brazil. ( I don’t agree with the category, but because it’s how it’s labeled and easily located) Also, web results on any “underground” music from other countries would be on world music recorded in compilations. I hate compilations! And most view about music from certain countries are known from compilations like Putumayo…. My question always was “how can we make web results about music more ‘democratic”? Is that possible?”
Hi Debora,
What do you mean by democratic results?
I often use hype machine to find out what’s a hit on Twitter but in the case of mainstream and underground music GV’s role would stay the same as now is with MSM and citizen voices. Curating music that wouldn’t otherwise reach a broader audience. Generally, there is no chance to compete with popular music because it is just like that; people are tweeting more Lana Del Rey than indie rock from Prague. But a page curating “underground” music with maps, tag clouds and presenting stories can help a lot. (Also if we have partners who sometimes promote the ones we promote.)
I like Juan’s idea of promoting music with social lyrics! I imagine posts like this one of Juliana: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/06/24/colombia-video-mapping-the-city-to-hip-hop/
not trying to compete at all! I am not naive…. just thinking how to help people find things they are actually looking!
When I talk about the lusophone, for example, that’s what I am saying.. with most of my efforts on trying to find something, even very specific, it is very hard… it gets lot in the way of non related results… so that’s why I always thought a map could work well, it would be a start, since it aggregates info from different artists making highly accessible with time through repeated search results leading to it.
http://marilyn.integralcity.com/2012/02/02/civil-society-2-0-music-recalibrates-integral-city-2-0/