So last year, I was bitching about how the music industry is stifling the inevitable “Big Flip”, where you switch from a “filter, then publish” model for analog production, to a “publish, then filter” model for digital production, where content is first made available, and then sorted for quality. (This is how Google and Blogdex work, for example.) I was in particular lamenting the lack of user-generated filtering that could break the bottleneck of the A&R (Artists and Repetoire) departments of the big music firms.
So now my homeboy Lucas Gonze has gone and built it. It’s Webjay, a site for trading user-generated playlists. Best of all, it’s designed for playlists that feature music that is legitimately available over the web:
Even though we won’t censor users, we would be grateful if users would censor themselves. Webjay exists to promote music which has been authorized for distribution on the web, not to make it easier to find unauthorized music. Please do not post links to unauthorized music. It will bring trouble. It will promote hoarded music at the expense of music libre. It will be stupid — posting hoarded music on the web is a really bad idea.
So you get three filters in one — someone else has vetted the music for quality, the music is rolled up in thematic playlists, further raising the “If you like X, you might also like Y” quotient, and everything you hear is (at least putatively) music libre. [Many-to-Many]