There is a new article about “The Future of Music” everyday. Every once in a while something is written on the topic that seems to indicate a bench mark in the discussion, something with a little perspective. A recent ReadWriteWeb article has some of these qualities. The article specifically deals with the online aspect of the future of music and what types of services we may see more of.

[Picture from a section of the article titled "Legal Battles With Record Labels"]

A friend showed me this video a while back. It illustrates and provides a good example for something happening on a larger scale, something referred to as The Loudness War. And now a quote from the glorious wikipedia:

The phrase loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the music industry’s tendency to record, produce and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness each year to create a sound that stands out from others and the previous year.

INQ is a website that features the releases of 28 (I counted) different netlabels. The site looks nice and doesn’t have the ‘crawler’ or ‘machine’ feel to it that a lot of “community” sites have. Each label featured on INQ has their own subpage, with a brief description of what they do and a 1 hour mix of their material. It seems that each label is required to submit a mix to be listed on INQ.

These mixes are a great way to get a general feel for what each label is doing and I’ve enjoyed listening through them and exploring. There are so many netlabels out there and there are probably even more that are not on a list. It’s a bit overwhelming.

I am less interested in the “news” aspect of the collective because it mirrors content being published elsewhere. The mixes, however, are a nice touch and they are a nice alternative to going to 28 different websites.

Myplaylist is a service that compiles a playlist of available music and pictures on the internet. You type in a name of a band and then you can chose from one or more already created playlists of songs and images. A playlist will be automatically created for you on the spot if you are searching for something new. While you are listening to music, you can watch a slideshow of flickr images based on the search. I like the use of flickr images playing to music.

Myplaylist has a fairly basic function and that’s great. Beyond this function there is a little more fun to be had. I’ve discovered a lot of random awesome remixes by well known artists, stuff I didn’t know existed. The results of my search have been unexpected which has been a pleasant surprise.

Fun experiments

For those that like mashups: you can open up multiple myplaylist ’sessions’.

For those that are interested in the tagging phenomena: type in a random phrase or number and a playlist will be generated. I was just listening to a playlist of ‘untitled’ songs and it was pretty cool.

G.R.L. Vienna putting back the Chaos in 24C3 from Of Many Names on Vimeo