Music-sharing

Is it a sock or a is it a glove?
I’ve been doing some preliminary work on music-sharing. There’s not much of a literature in this area, but I did find this which shows how music-sharing is ‘richly interlinked with other social practices.’ The authors (writing in 2001) suggest that the challenge for developers is to create technologies that enable users to strengthen existing friendships, make new friends and social contacts. It struck me that there are some key differences between music-sharing and photo-sharing. In photo-sharing you offer your interests, your activity – parts of your personal narrative, whereas music-sharing is much more about signaling affiliation and identity through consumption. The power of recommendation is, after all a significant part of group membership. So allconsuming.com achieves this through the act of naming musical tastes, but pandora.com offers this through the act of sharing files themselves. More to follow…