While viewing the NYC Marathon in Williamsburg, yesterday, and listening to Nikki Shannon and her band play, while waves of runners past, I had a glimpse of an idea, not sure if this has been done yet, but parts of it already exist.
To begin, many artists, of all types, have lousy websites that aren’t found easily in search engines. Even worse, manyof those same sites have lousy usability issues, and, there’s little if any web analytics tracking.
There are a few web services such as Pandora, Genius from Apple, I believe, iLike; these services a built to figure out music you like, play more if it, and hope you buy some of it.
Also, services like Upcoming, Yelp, to some extent Facebook, MySpace and other Social networks connecting events and friends. Social Networks like Going.com and Meetup.com want to figure out what you like and match you up with a group or event, Going is more focused on event promoters than on you while Meetup is becoming annoying in it’s attempts to sell me on every new meetup that meets what it thinks I’m interested in.
But what connects up a group like Nikki Shannon, who a friend of mine said sounded to her like Sheryl Crow, and a Pandora preference for that kind of music?
Maybe I missed it, but I don’t see anything that does that.
So, let’s say that I have Pandora (if it doesn’t go out of business, first), it knows what I like, knows where I live or am at the moment, knows what I am prepared to pay, has clips of the artists and information about the venue.
Most of this stuff exists, but it lives all over the web, not in one service, and even if it did, not well.
My point is, in this era of economic contraction, innovation may come not so much, from inventing new things, as much as making what we already have done, work well ….. Connecting the Dots.
