Song Circles

Sometimes the best things on the internet are not intentional. Over the past several months, I’ve developed a song circle with a small group of friends on tumblr. They include Rach, Bijan, JoeLaz, Daryn, and Lindsay. I know a few of these people and plan to meet a couple more shortly. But we never planned this song circle. And this is my song circle. Each of them has a different song circle.

I just started posting a song every day on tumblr. You can listen to my songs on this blog on the upper right (check autoplay to make it a playlist).

Then I noticed others were doing the same. I started to follow them in my dashboard. Then I found the filter button in the tumblr dashboard and started filtering for audio. That gives you this:

Song_circle

Now every day I try to listen to the song circles we create. It’s not that we share exactly the same tastes in music. But it’s close enough. It’s like going back to college and hanging out with friends and playing music for each other. It’s wonderful.

#My Music#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. Joe Lazarus

    Who’s that handsome devil second down from the top? Oh, right…. that’s me. The song circle rocks. Keeping my fingers crossed for some sort of playlist player inside Tumblr so I can listen to the circle without interruption.

    1. fredwilson

      I want that too. It would be hugeFred

  2. chrisherbert

    Anonymous Professor recently posted on a similar concept, Last.fm friend networks. He some great analysis and amazing visualizations too of the friend networks/clusters: http://anonymousprof.com/wh…One of the findings, perhaps obvious, is that “there is a big tail with the majority of users having only a few friends.” I remember your post on Last.fm visualizations and this guy is next hoping to marry the Last.fm friend network analysis with listening history. Sounds fascinating and can’t wait to see the results.

  3. bijan

    I couldn’t agree more.I’m having so much fun in this song circle.great post.

  4. daryn

    The song circle is definitely one of my highlights from using tumblr so far, and I look forward to meeting all of you should our paths ever cross!

  5. Pierre

    That is pretty cool Fred.It’s rare that we get to openly see how other people are using music in new social ways. I can see that kind of habit developing into something really big (and disruptive) over the next few years as storing, sharing and accessing personal music collections in ‘the cloud’ becomes even more popular for average people.The music industry needs to stop focusing as much on simply monetizing music directly. The real profit from this point on is in monetizing the behavior that develops around music.

  6. Jay Parkhill

    Tumblr MP3 blogging is really fun and really easy, but it’s REALLY hard to find other tumblrs to follow without spending a lot of time at it. I’m hoping that will change sometime soon.

  7. daryn

    If you’re using my widget, here’s a little easter egg.. :)You can enter in a list of comma-seperated tumblr urls, and they’ll all load into the player, sorted reverse-chronologically (with everyone intermixed).It can take awhile to load multiple feeds, but I made myself a little page with a widget that has all of my friends’ tumblrs in it, and it’s like an always evolving mixtape.

    1. fredwilson

      Wow. Can’t wait to try that!Fred