How Music Gets in Your Life

I've never been one of those who embraced the iTunes store, the iPod, and the entire culture that sprung up around that.  I guess I suspected that the iTunes store was simply designed as a siphon that could be placed with one end in your bank account and then it would begin to drain while you enjoyed the music of your life.

The thing is, there have always been interesting alternatives.

One friend of mine ripped all of his CD collection into MP3 files and placed them on drives attached a single Linux server. This was long before Napster and before the RIAA launched its jihad on music lovers everywhere.


A recent surging trend among those who mention these things to me is experimentation with Pandora Radio.  I'll have more to say about that later on, in another article.

But now, I'm more interested in what I'm seeing about Reverb Nation.  Doing some research for a friend who's a music promoter, I had occasion to visit RN again to check out some things.  I observed this:

The interface is clean and steps away from a lot of traditional web delivery.  But it also can be sluggish and lag a bit.  I found that many times I clicked a control or took some action -- and as I gave up believing that the system got my command, ready to click a second time -- the system would lurch to its next screen.

On the other hand, once I set up a playlist with some music from different places, it did a fine job of getting the music to me.  I'm listening to music from their system as I write this.

I'll take a closer look at the new treatment that MySpace is giving to musicians, and compare both of these against Pandora Radio and we'll see what I think.

For right now, I'm satisfied with Reverb Nation and like it enough to have fully filled out my profile there.  So perhaps I'll see you there.  If so, I'll share some of my favorite tracks with you.