Nightlight Playlist

I spent some time this morning picking a few tunes from Reverbnation to make a playlist called "Nightlight". Its worth a listen!

There are really great songs out there being made by people who are extraordinarily talented in writing and performing. These tunes may not be altogether popular with bigtime music executives, or with their fourteen-year-old daughters they pattern their music tastes to, but that is the best part about it. The music exec strategy reminds me of The Blues Brothers, "Oh, we've got both kinds of music: Country and Western."

I hope that you enjoy the playlist!

New Music-Snake Oil Medicine Show

I got onto Reverbnation to find something new. I wanted to listen to a blue grass-y sort of thing, but not the traditional thing. I thought for a moment about how I would find this and resorted to looking for The Biscuit Burners, which I had discovered this summer and enjoy greatly. However, they had three recommendations, one of which looked a little different, they are called Snake Oil Medicine Show and, like the Biscuit Burners are out of Asheville, NC. SOMS have a few tunes on their Reverbnation site and I must say they are a lot of fun. They have tempo changes, vocal harmonies, funny song names that still describe the song, lots of instrumental space, banjos, violins, whistles, and a female vocalist's voice that is high pitched and has almost a comical, Old Time quality to it, but it works so well. They sound pretty accomplished and just super enjoyable to listen to. They describe themselves as "World/Reggae/Slam Grass/Psycho Billy".
I'm a new fan of SNAKE OIL MEDICINE SHOW! Check them out!

Problems and solutions (?)

So my previous post discussed the primary problem for listeners and musicians in this age of easy, cheap music recordings and everything internet:

Listeners: finding the right song

Artists: finding the right listeners

I glossed over how companies have approached solving this problem, but will address some of that here. There have been a lot of solutions, far more than I would want to get into on this post. Pandora may be the most logical and elegant so far - use known music to find new. It also lends itself to emerging artists something like 70%, but only 60,000 artists are present in the database and it is internet radio (which I'm not fond of). That said, it certainly has done well - an average of 2.3MM unqiue views per month according to Compete. Last.fm has also done well, albeit by using genre and social networking groups (average of 1.8MM unique visitors). (I'm not sure what percent of music on Last.fm is independent. Anyone know?)

These two sites have really caught people's attention and they should be proud of that (graph to the right), but they are not alone by any means. There are others out there trying to solve these problems too. Owl Multimedia is a really cool idea, but I'm honestly not yet convinced it works - it hasn't worked for me...yet. It also appears that I may not be the only one to think this, because so far it hasn't caught on (3,222 average unique visitors/month) according to Compete.

Then there are the hosting sites for independent artists. Of those that I've looked at Reverbnation does slightly better than Virb according to Compete (220K vs. 169K unique visitors/month average). Fuzz comes in a distant third with 11.7K.

The disparity in these numbers (successful modestly indpendent music search sites (Pandora) vs. mostly independent music hosting sites (Reverbnation, etc.) speaks volumes I think. It indicates that I'm not alone when I become frustrated scouring the sites for songs as a listener. When using Reverbnation, Virb, or Fuzz one resorts to the typical formulas: genre, band location, newness, and that popularity contest that I hated in high school. As an artist, one does all that one can do to get noticed - cool names, cool pics, but ultimately can only hope that the right people find one's tune, and as a former colleague of mine often said, "Hope is not a strategy". Truth be told, I've got original tunes posted on all three of these sites, and I'm really hoping that these tunes get noticed. The odds are against getting noticed by the right people randomly though...and that brings us right back to where we were when we started - we still have the problems.

Needles in haystacks - finding that tune

I must admit I'm pretty intimidated when I cruise over to a music hosting site like Reverbnation or Virb and try to find a tune I like. After the first few tunes I've spent time hunting for by genre I'm pretty impatient and irritated by the whole process. I'm impatient because of the time it takes to find something if, for example, I'm looking for Celtic music and find everything under the sun with "celtic" in the keyword, and I'm irritated because I ultimately decide on listening to a song because of the image or name associated with the artist, album or song. I've judged a book by its cover! I may miss the coolest tune, but alas have no "cue" to look for it. Perhaps this applies to me more than others simply because my music tastes tend to be on the outer rim of mainstream (there are some exceptions: loved early-career R.E.M, early Sting (solo), dig U2), but I'm sure everyone struggles with this to some degree. If there is someone out there who does not, I'd love to hear how you deal with tihs problem!


There are organizations that have brought in Web2.0 - I can think of many - to help sort through this problem by social networking, but there is always that someone that was the first to find a band/song/album. How did he/she do it? He or she must have some cue from somewhere. Moreover, is popularity really solving the problem? Just because "Roll out the Barrel" is well known doesn't make it interesting to listen to as discovery! It does make it easy to find, however.


The problem for listeners is finding something new and appropriate and the problem for emerging artists is getting listened to by the right group of listeners.

Hounds to the Music