> http://testindustries.typepad.com/test/2007/07/past-mastered.html
> Anyway, enough excuses, > here goes; has anyone noticed the way that the same limited set of > releases are getting played and charted all the time? > I'm not trying to diss the legal digital download sites - hey, I even > work for one - but it seems like the opposite is now happening to what > the gatekeepers of the digital revolution had originally predicted. > Remember a few years back, all the talk about the unlimited choice > that the availability of electronic music in digital formats promised, > the way we'd be able to buy the most obscure release or that the > staggering range that these groundbreaking services offered would make > it easier for even an aspiring DJ to differentiate him/herself from > the pack. Unfortunately, it hasn't quite turned out that way, yet the > sites can't be blamed: even a cursory look at Beatport reveals an > exhaustive catalogue of music, but the problem is that nearly all of > the users seem unwilling to delve deeper than the current top 10 or > recommendations from their favourite DJs. I think the bottom line here is it takes a LOT of patience to sift through all the crappy tracks, regardless of genre, if you want to get away from the easy choices. On Beatport, I usually go through a few genres and listen to the last two weeks of new releases, track by track, at least for a few seconds each. However it can get incredibly tedious, and my ears will get burned out, cus a lot of times that means listening to 300+ track excerpts in a session to find what I want. And that's not even delving into back catalog! So it's understandable that people go for the top ten lists first, even if it makes for a rather boring musical experience when everybody buys the same cuts. What might help is to have more of a social networking approach to tracks, where users, not the distributors, are connecting the dots, and you can get custom recommendations based on your past choices, rather than having premade choices selected from above. However, flock behavior would still cause the biggest names to be overrepresented in one's choices--maybe you could even set a filter though, to NOT show the really big stuff in your recommendations. ~David
