Content Curation World

Robin Good: Music playlists are the best means to support the discovery of music, new and old, and the most effective for any music lover to find and appreciate the very music he likes. Beyond the tradition of artists and stars there is a future of music streams and playlists tailored to very specific tastes, genres and styles.

You do not need to go much far to see that this is in fact already happening. Open iTunes and go within any of the radio sections to realize instantly how niche, curated channels / playlists are the positively the way forward.

While this article on PaidContent utilizes the transition from the album to the playlist as a mere introduction to a set of small complaints about Spotify ability to effectively let users organize their music, I find that this introduction is worth many times the rest of the article.

It may read as obvious stuff, but if you think about it, music curation (playlists created and made navigable in many different ways) are effectively a fantastic, powerful means to let more people discover and enjoy the very music they like the most, with the benefit of all parties involved (artist, listener, curator, middleman/recording company).

From the original article: "The album is dead, long live the playlist – the new primary container unit of music consumption.

iTunes Store’s disaggregation of the album in to its individual parts long ago allowed listeners to reassemble those parts to their own, not artists’, preference.

In fact, there is no more apt an emblem for how our generation can now curate and remix content of all kinds for itself than the music playlist.

...

But is this playlist-centric music universe pre-destined to be the best means of consumption today and going forward?"

I think it is, and nonetheless the author (Robert Andrews) has some respectful complaints about how Spotify lets you save and organize your music, I expect playlist creation and sharing tools to get greater traction as the preferred means to explore organize and make music more accessible to the very people who could appreciate it the most."

Rightful. 7/10

Full article: http://paidcontent.org/2012/08/22/declaring-playlist-bankruptcy-lost-in-a-land-of-infinite-choice/