With So Many Music Communities, Where Do I Begin?

While basically the entire world has turned to the internet for communication, the music scene is clearly no exception. Multitudes of online music communities have popped up all over the internet, and while some cater to people who enjoy specific genres, others allow for people to communicate and share their tastes with other people. Personally, I’m a member of five online music communities, each with their positives and negatives, but all allow me to communicate with other people in some form or another.

Last.fm is an international music community that takes tracks “scrobbed” from your personal music library which allows other music lovers to compare music compatibility. People can view your top played songs, artists and albums and leave comments on your musical tastes. Likewise, you can view their tracks, and offer suggestions that are relevant to their tastes. Not only can you communicate with others, but you can search for artists, record labels, and events happing around your area that coincide with your musical interests. You can get all of these features for free, and the people that you meet are full of musical insight.

For users of MOG, the idea is pretty simple, ‘discover people through music, and music through people.’ MOG doesn’t really stand for anything specific, but the concept is the same in some ways to that of Last.fm. However, users of MOG are encouraged to write blogs about music they love or hate, and even some noted musicians including Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie, The Postal Service) update their MOG pages weekly and communicate with everyday people on their musical opinions. Like Last.fm, MOG uses a downloaded feature to categorize your likes and sends weekly recommendations on artists (known and unknown) that you might enjoy, as well as users that share similar musical compatibility with you. However, MOG is a bit more personable and easier to use, and they allow for more personal opinion than that of Last.fm.

MySpace Music is pretty simple, and expanding every day. Anybody around the world who has a MySpace account can take advantage of the music community that features artists that are signed with major record labels, minor labels and unsigned bands. It’s pretty uncommon to find a current top 100 artist without a page, which includes some of their songs, pictures, informational blog, tour dates, and a comment section for fans to post their thoughts. Although it’s possible to be ‘friends’ with these bands, the chances that they monitor and respond to you is slim, and not everyone on MySpace is as keen on being friends for the sake of music, so this source is mainly to discover new bands and check in on old ones.

For people more into a local or unsigned music scene, I suggest that you check out PureVolume. While they endorse up and coming bands, their main focus is the small local scene which they tailor to your location when you as a listening sign up. Meeting friends is a lot harder, since this site isn’t as popular, but if offers up good information on when local shows or festivals are taking place. It happens to benefit the bands more than the listeners because smaller record labels search the sight looking for new prospects, so if they get a good following on this sight, they might be heading for that next big break.

Pandora Radio, or the “Music Genome Project” is a pretty new and cool idea put together by a group of music lovers who wanted to build a massive music library and open it up for anyone who wanted to listen. Once you join, you can enter a certain artist, song, album or genre, and the site will custom make a radio preset based off of your entry, and finds things that relate specifically to what you searched. You get some songs that you may know, but it’s mostly to broaden your musical awareness and let you know that there is more out there than what you’re just listening to.

This has gotten rather lengthy rather quickly, but just a few notes before I finish. All of these sites that I mentioned are completely free, and easy to use. The accounts can be cancelled at any time if you find that you’re not happy with the service, or simply don’t have the time to keep up with it. I encourage everyone to at least try one and see what happens, and the links are posted on the right hand side of the blog site. You’ll never know when you could discover your new favorite band, or meet someone across the world with the same musical interests as you.

I’ll be back Wednesday, but this time I’ll be tackling my first review of Chris Walla’s freshman solo release, Field Manual, as well as discussing indie-pop favorites The Spinto Band.

So long, dear friends.