Finding Content

About two years ago, I was sitting just before a class taught by William "Bill" Gasarch was starting. He was asking the class their opinion on the most important invention in the last twenty years. I said, the browser. Other people also concurred. It's not so much the browser, obviously. The browser is just the medium which you receive content, like the radio is the medium you receive content. Without radio stations broadcasting content, the radio would do no good. Same for the browser.

It's sad that I'm reduced to calling music "content", but that's the way industry refers to it ("content providers"). I won't go into a long discussion about how things get named and then used (e.g., how the word "disruptive" became something good).

The impact of the world wide web is likely to increase over time as applications on the web get better and the ability to find things on the web also gets better. Once upon a time, when we were in high school, it was hard to meet anyone outside the high school. Nowadays, you simply create an interesting webpage, and people come and seek you. Thus, people often have at least two sets of friends: those in real life, and those on the Internet.

I could go on about that topic, how the Internet has changed the way we relate to people. But instead, I want to talk about how to find content on the web.

Since it's easy enough to get your own webpage, it's also become increasingly easy for bands to put their stuff on webpages. They don't have to rely on a label to promote the heck out of them. Sure, such bands may never get popular enough to make lots of money, but may do well enough to make a living at it.

The question is: how do you find such bands? This was a question that was posed on some NPR show I was listening to. I find that the primary way is for me to listen to NPR's All Songs Considered. However, there are other ways to find interesting stuff. There are Internet radio stations, but I find I'd rather hear recommendations. Much in the same way that I often decide to watch a film based on what critics say, I like to listen to music that way too. There's so much stuff out there, that I'd rather use critics as a filter, and then decide what to pick after that. Of course, that makes my listening habits seem "cool" by some standards. I might listen to "crappier" bands, but they never make it past my initial filter, which isn't to say I wouldn't find them compelling, because I might. It's just that there's way too much stuff for me to spend time searching for them.

While listening to the interview of Tapes N' Tapes on audiovant, I heard the phrase "blog dorks" which I guess are people who use blogs to find music content, and scour what people write to find out about music (I need to listen to that interview again to make sure I didn't mischaracterize it).

Sometimes I find a band completely by accident. Well, not completely. For example, I was looking at links at Amazon, trying to find some new music to listen to. This lead me to Sufjan Stevens last summer. I went and bought his CD of Illinois. Little did I know then that he was going to be the indie darling of 2005, even then. Had I known about NPR's site, I would have found out about him sooner.

In fact, if you go there now, you can listen to one of Sufjan's latest songs. Sufjan is an incredibly prolific songwriter. He wrote some 50 songs for Illinois although about 15 of them finally made it to the CD. He's releasing The Avalanche in July, with so-called outtakes, i.e., songs that didn't make it. Some of them he's gone back and revisited and retooled.

At times, I wonder if he'll just cut loose and do a rock or punk kind of song. In fact, he has done songs that are a bit different from the folk stuff he is most associated with. In particular, A Sun Came!. He's also made Enjoy Your Rabbit which is rather experimental and is the only album of his I don't own.

Even with Sufjan, there's a few songs that you can't find anywhere out there. NPR had an interview with people living in Arkansas who found a bird long thought extinct. He wrote a song for that (the interviewers that it would be cool if he did that, and so he did) and from that came Lord God Bird. If you Google some, you can find a collection of Christmas songs he recorded, again, unavailable on CD.

Although I look for new music, I can't say it's a passion by any stretch. There are folks whose musical library makes mine look paltry by comparison. For example, those who are really into music can describe it like people describe fine wine. They place it in a genre, compare it to other bands, perhaps even identify chord progressions used. I don't really play guitar (I think that would honestly help my listening if I knew more about how to compose rock music).

Ah, I'm getting distracted from my point (again). The point is that the web has allowed for a lot of content to get produced, a lot of it quite bad, and a lot of it hard to find. Social networking allows others to do the work. However, it still takes some work to find sites that you trust to get ideas, and over time, that list evolves as you find new sites to check out. Will audiovant become this new site that spots talent or at least brings talent to come and be interviewed?

Who knows? How long will it last?

Are we becoming increasingly splintered in the kind of content we have access to and listen or watch? Will we listen to music and watch television/movies more like we read books where there are many, many authors, some with devoted, but not numerous followers.