Media discovery on the web is not nearly where it should be. In fact, dare I say it is broken. There is more media available online than ever before and there are a lot of great sites out there with tremendous content, communities and features/functions. The issue is that while I can pretty much find anything I want to at any time, it takes way more work than it should and I miss a ton of great content - daily.
I loved all the year in review stuff recently (Rolling Stone, Pitchfork) because it helped me know what I have missed in terms of music and movies (I don’t really watch much TV beyond sports and 5 minutes of Charlie Rose before passing out). Bon Iver, Girl Talk and TV on the Radio are three kick ass albums I just recently purchased as a result of those reviews. But critics top picks and year end reviews come out once a year. I need something more reliable for the rest of the time.
I wish it was much easier for me to understand what my friends on Facebook are listening to and watching (sorry iLike tries but doesn’t get there, Facebook you should buy Lala) as well as what is cool, hot or interesting to the world at large - without having to scan a bunch of blogs. Basically, how the problem is currently being solved - namely search or editiorial or mystery algorithms misses the experience I am looking for. Media consumption and discovery needs to be intelligent, delightful, effortless and way more engaging than it is. There are some cool things going on - Hype Machine, Pandora, Hulu, Lala and Songbird are all very impressive. I know we can do better.
I have been giving this topic a fair amount of thought and research recently and plan to share some of this information in coming posts. Among the topics currently on my mind to cover are:
- Music industry economics and emerging realities.
- Online video economics and emerging realities.
- My favorite media experiences and features on the web
- The broken social social discovery experience
- Broken algorithmic discovery experience
- Cool trends (technology, industry, etc.)
- Ideas to make media discovery and consumption more delightful
- Thoughts on industry changes to dramatically grow revenue growth rates
Stay Tuned.