YouRadio
KeithHandy posted in Featured Posts on January 20th, 2008
It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was saying “if only video was as standardized as audio”. At the file format level, it’s still relatively true; you can talk about OGG, MP4, FLAC, and so on, but ultimately, there’s no such thing as a person out there who can’t listen to an mp3… whereas, if you’re making a video, and want to send it to everyone in the world, good luck.
But the file format level is no longer the hurdle. At the web level, the problem is pretty much the opposite. You can put up as much video as you want on YouTube, it costs nothing, the sound and picture quality aren’t bad enough to make it unwatchable, and everybody basically knows what YouTube is, how to embed it, how to promote on it, and so on. For everyone but the high-def snobs, video delivery has been solved for some time.
Not so for plain audio. We can find free hosting for the files, but to present them in a “ready to play” format requires figuring out where to put them. And, as I’ve recently learned, figuring out how to make them available to humans only…
In the big picture, this may not be a bad thing.
Although my first instinct is to ask, well, why the hell don’t we have an audio equivalent of YouTube? Something like a “YouRadio” or whatever… okay, well suppose we did. Suppose there was such a thing.
I would hate it.
I can tell you that right now, in full certainty. Why? Because I’ve always hated music culture, and the whole “promo” activity scene. Get your band heard, get your band discovered, get your band ranked higher, get your band this and that… spend more and more time playing this like a game, and less time exploring the creative act of navigating unknown musical waters. And that’s exactly what a YouRadio would be. Promo-noise. The only people interested in bands are other bands, and the only reason they’re interested is because of what they think they can get for themselves by association.
Music, at a fundamental level, is a genuine thing that happens to a person. A person hears some music, a person is affected by the music. If anything else is happening — supporting your friends because you like them as people, etc. — it’s phony.
I’m here to create, not to compete. Trying to rise to the top in a heap of artists all trying to rise to the top is scarcity-minded. Engaging in this sport reinforces the tiny prize-to-contestant ratio as a reality, unnecessarily. Rather than seeing myself as one of millions of musicians, I see myself as one of only one: me. There is no other me. I don’t have to compete with anyone else to be myself. The noise everyone else is making is their problem, not mine. (Not that you’re all making “noise” individually — just collectively.)
But I digress. Since there is no “YouRadio”, I can stop bitching about how awful it hypothetically is. And suppose it did exist, and was useful, and free, and gave you an easy way to embed all your songs in flash players such that you would be rewarded rather than penalized for accruing plays over time. What features would I want it to have? Well, maybe it would be nice if it could display lyrics. Or production notes. Or some kind of images associated with the songs…
(Thanks to Heather for having a baby for the sole purpose of illustrating the parent-child relationship between necessity and invention.)
So, like, it would be audio… but with video. In other words, maybe the ideal “YouRadio” would simply be YouTube.
So now, I wouldn’t be making videos just to promote the audio; the videos would be the audio delivery. Out of necessity. And the fact that there’s anything to look at on the screen will just be a bonus.
First goal: get one song up from each album. The “music videos” don’t need to be any slicker than the session videos… just be imaginative.
And at least now I’d be doing it for a tangible reason.
