Playlist work in progress

Posted by Lucas Gonze, February 26, 2006 at 10:23 pm, in YMusicBlog General, Yahoo! Music Unlimited. 13 Comments

We have been experimenting with Yahoo! Music Unlimited shared playlists, exploring the boundaries in an informal way. This blog entry is to share two things that came out of it.

Playlists by Lyndsey Parker

We asked Lyndsey Parker, a staff rock writer at Yahoo, to do a playlist themed around a news event. This was an experiment in professionally-produced content; an experiment in themed playlists; a sample document for us to use while we’re learning how to publish shared playlists; and part of a project to establish the social practice of playlisting among Yahoo! Music Unlimited users.Lyndsey’s first playlist took a few days to come back, and after that she turned a couple more around almost right away. The timing told me that it’s hard to get started, but once you’re started the activity is addictive.

Playlist one: Cheney’s Got A Gun

Per Lyndsey:

So, our Veep is saying he may never go hunting again. But that won’t stop us from hunting for tunes to dedicate to ol’ Quick Trigger Dick. This playlist is now cocked and loaded for your listening pleasure…give it a shot!

The news event here was Cheney’s hunting accident last week, before the Dubai thing took over the headlines. This features such numbers as “Quail Hunt”, “Hey Man Nice Shot”, and “I Still Miss You (but My Aim Is Getting Better)”.

Given that this was an experiment, what can we say about the results? It’s more lively and human than anything you’d hear on the radio. On the other hand the editorial voice is too formal for the internet; it sounds like a writer instead of a blogger. Lastly, using a news story as the theme gave the playlist a novelty feeling.

Among other problems with our software which I learned about as a result of this playlist, these stood out:

  1. Yahoo! Music Unlimited pages only work in Internet Explorer in Windows, and even then only if you have Yahoo! Music Engine installed. Otherwise you get a 1998 error.
  2. There was no easy way to copy and paste the song list, making it hard to reblog. This stops playlists from developing into viral hits.

Playlist two: Union Jack Swing: (brit hip hop)

Per Lyndsey:

The U.K. may have stricter gun-control laws, and its rappers may rhyme about such polite subjects as pub quizzes, footie matches, and mushy peas. And yes, these Brit-hoppers’ crisp, lilting accents may be more Masterpiece Theater than Master P. But as Dizzee Rascal’s knife wounds and Goldie Lookin Chain’s voracious nacrotic intake attest, life in Britain’s council estates can still be hardscrabble indeed. Listen here for a little Brit grit from the ‘hoods across the pond.

In this playlist Lyndsey moved away from the news theme and towards purely musical territory, in this case using a sub-genre as the organizing principle. I liked this one more.

Partly the appeal is that the author had fun doing it, and that comes through. As with MP3 blogs and album liner notes, this art is best practiced by obsessive record collectors.

And partly the appeal is that this was a good idea for a playlist. Playlisting is a curatorial art, meaning that the process is about picking out other works. Even though you can’t change the works you pick (aside from the ways in which the context affects them), you have complete freedom to make up the criteria you will use. Lyndsey picked a great criteria.

Lessons learned: (1) playlisting is for lovers; (2) to get great playlists, leave the organizing principle to the playlister.

Playlist three: Manchester Melancholy

Per Lyndsey:

Considering all the great (if gloomy) music that comes out of this city, there must be something in the water in Manchester–that is, the buckets and buckets of rainwater that fall daily upon what many say is not-so-merry olde England’s answer to Detroit. Prepare to cry into your black-&-tan as you get all mopey to this Mancunian mood music.

This playlist is built around bummer glam-doom stars like Joy Division and the Smiths. At this point it was pretty obvious that Lyndsey had found her groove, and that it happened at the same time she started playing with genre.

Yahoo! Music Unlimited Playlisters Group

One of the things we learned from having Lyndsey’s playlists in hand is that we didn’t have any good places to spotlight Yahoo! Music Unlimited playlists. We can and should build software to meet this need, but that’s quite a big project, and we’ll have a better idea of what we ought to build if we have some practice.Since we’re learning by doing in the first place, there’s no reason to stop with the playlist. We might as well improvise some social software for bleeding-edge types to use for sharing Yahoo! Music Unlimited playlists, and for that purpose there’s nothing like a mailing list.Ok, then: the ymuplaylisters mailing list.ymuplaylisters is a community for Yahoo! Music Unlimited users to announce their own shared playlists and find playlists by others. Participating without a Yahoo! Music Unlimited account wouldn’t make much sense, but you don’t have to be a yahoo. You do have to be an adventurous type who doesn’t mind bleeding-edge technology, though, since part of our purpose is to go where the bugs are.

P.S.

One last thing before I miss my chance: this is my first post inside the firewall here, so…Hello, Yahoo! World!*

13 Comments »

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  1. p.p.s.: The reason this entry has a lot of missing paragraph breaks is that I manually edited the HTML, and this exercised a bug in wordpress which caused it to do crazy things with the paragraph breaks.

    Comment by Lucas Gonze — February 26, 2006 #

  2. This is tangential – but when will we be able to share what we’re listening to in Yahoo! Messenger? I’d like to, when I’m listening to a good playlist, pass music to my friends too… or at least the list of what’s playing.

    Comment by blooflame — February 27, 2006 #

  3. Well, there are so many things to say about the playlist I don’t know where to start. I am currently working on a book that lays out 70 playlist types and gives examples of each, as well as information on how best to research and compile them for the most impact. “Songs by Producer”, Songs for Situations”, “Influence Chains”, “News Stories”, “Playlist Rock Operas”, “Moods”, “Songs That Feature…”, etc. etc.

    Under these 70 high-level categories there are many sub-level categories. For instance, “Rolling Stones Covers” could be “The Highest Charting Rolling Stones Covers”, “Reggae Stones Covers”, “Tattoo You, Covered” or even as specific as “Acoustic Jazz Stones Covers With Female Vocalists” My point is, the possibilities for arranging music are endless and more interesting than anything going in technology today. (well, in my opinion anyway)

    Remember that K-tel compilation you had in 10th grade? We can put them together. Want to know all of the songs in a film that were not on the soundtrack? We can do it. How about every song ever used by Coca-Cola in a TV commercial? Songs for a Nurse’s Graduation Party? Every song that features Billy Preston on Organ? Songs that feature Fart Noises? Blah, blah, freakin’ blah! Sometimes I cause myself cluster headaches by thinking about the cool things you can do, and the value it adds.

    Basically, I see playlists breaking into three camps:

    1: The Community Playlist Database
    A place where anyone can upload their playlists, they can be rated, catalogued, etc. Lots of this out there, FIQL, Mixmatcher, internal to YMU and Rhapsody. This model has value, but in an early MP3.com kinda way. You have to sift through thousands of trash playlists like “Good Songs” to find a decent list.

    2: The Edited Playlist
    Knowledgeable, creative music fanatics set free to go nuts with a good cataloguing system. The blog was made for this. This model can also find the cream of the crop from #1 above to re-distribute. Good, reliable, interesting and educated content will always work, no matter how it’s delivered.

    3: The Playlist Building Community
    Whether it uses a system of fact-checkers and music editors or a wiki system. The community members can create and edit each others playlists as well as their own. This has immense archival and educational value. For example, I did a list on Songs With Theremin
    This list is not a matter of opinion and contains no creative effort, however it takes research. A recording either has Theremin, or it doesn’t. If a community member knows a track that’s missing, they can add it. Disagreements spur more research and eventually a definitive Theremin playlist. Now image this with every instrument, time signature, songwriter, sidemen, recording studio, etc.

    I could speak on this for days, but I think I’ll stop here for now.

    Comment by Robert of the Radish — February 27, 2006 #

  4. Some more random thoughts on how to improve YMU playlisting from a playlisters perspective.

    -As Lucas pointed out, track listings needs to be easily copied for posting
    -Ability to search by keyword, across Artist, Album and song title
    - Search by composer, producer, recording studio, label, etc
    -Reduce the barriers for Internet citizens to listen to playlists posted online
    -Copy and Paste functionality in the Playlist Description box in YME
    -Ability to Tag Playlists
    -Random playlist load to portable device by user, genre, keyword, etc
    -Classical music is almost impossible to find on YMU for playlisting
    -Market and promote high-quality playlists, consumers just do not understand what can be done with them

    Comment by Robert of the Radish — February 27, 2006 #

  5. blooflame, you can share in Messenger. On your playlist page, click the “IM” link, then choose a Messenger friend, and they’ll receive your shared playlist.

    ian

    Comment by iancr — February 27, 2006 #

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