Music on Fanfare?

May 28, 2021 10:09 PM

I was wondering what people think of the idea of adding "Music" as a category for posting on Fanfare?

What I have in mind is the ability to make a post a song, or an album or any piece of music designed to be heard as one (opera, symphony, musical, etc). I'm inspired to this idea by posts like "I get all the news I need on the weather report" from noiseanoise - which produced an interesting discussion from a link to "The Only Living Boy in New York". Youtube has a number of "first reaction" and "what makes this song great" type channels - but I'd be interested in the opinions of Mefites.

Sorry, as ever if this has been looked at before.

posted by rongorongo to Feature Requests at 10:09 PM (12 comments total)

I had this same thought the other day, though I’m damned if I remember what inspired it. So +1 little pony whinny I guess.
posted by dismas at 7:31 AM on May 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

I like the idea. I'd participate.

The podcast category suggests it may not be well attended. I'm happy the podcast category exists, but it's more or less an opportunity for mefites to create a new topic and say, "here's a podcast you may not have heard about." (Which is useful.) The discussion has never really been much of a discussion except in a very few specific cases. I guess 20'000 mefites times a 5% total podcast audience among rich, English speaking people times 5% of mefites who click anywhere but the green and blue, times a few percent of listeners to any particular podcast would predict less than 1-2 comments on average. We're doing better than that, I think.

That there are twenty times as many people interested in talking about a single episode of a subscription, streaming, animated, Star Trek TV show aimed at young adults as any of the most popular podcasts in the world remains surprising to me. To be clear, I'm a fan of the both things. I don't think it needs to be changed. But, as someone who listens to a lot of audio and rarely watches TV, I find the discrepancy really puzzling.

But, perhaps music has a larger audience than podcasts. I'd be happy to see it tried.
posted by eotvos at 7:49 AM on May 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I offered this as a suggestion a while ago thinking that it could be a boon for Fanfare since there are a lot of people deep into music here who could offer lots of interesting posts that don't need to be framed as if posting to the blue and because you could often just directly link to the music, whether on Youtube or some other service, which would allow people to engage with it immediately, unlike movie or tv posts. Posting a link to an interesting music video, say, would only require a few minutes of time to view and post a response if that was of interest.

Lord knows its increasingly difficult to keep up with the huge variety of music out there, not to mention knowing what is or isn't known enough to warrant a "special post" on the blue, so having an option for a more casual way to link to something just cuz you like it would take some of that pressure off and maybe provide some response that leads to other music you hadn't heard. The only downside would maybe be in people using the posts to link to other songs that come to mind rather than making a separate posts, but that seems like something that could be worked around. This all assumes though that more traffic to Fanfare for such casual use is actually desired, if not, then it probably isn't a great idea.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:31 AM on May 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

Also interested in reading about music on Metafilter. (It's really hard to find people talking about music without forcing a genre; and not just review sites or whatever.)

Automation of any kind need not hold the project back, from a user's POV anyway: just the ability to start a text-description post under a new category "Music". Would be nice if users could choose (in the sense of Rules) the level of specificity they want: album, artist, or rarely song.
posted by sylvanshine at 11:49 PM on May 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

I think this would be really nice, and in a general sense it fits with our current plan to open up what FanFare supports this year. frimble has been outlining a possible approach and making progress detangling some of the existing FanFare assumptions when they can, with the aim of accommodating stuff without so much mandatory or highly-structured metadata like we've incorporated in the existing media categories. There's no timeline for this beyond "good chance we'll get it done this summer" since we have some more pressing infrastructure and bug stuff that takes dev priority, but I'm basically with y'all on this and it's something we're moving toward.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:00 AM on May 30, 2021 [12 favorites]

I'd love this as long as there was some criteria for which releases get posted - like 4 or 5 links to other reviews, or interviews with the artist for some background - so that a) there is some basis for actual discussion ("Oh I agreed with the blah blah article, this reminds me of their earlier stuff") and b) so it isn't just cluttered with "my favorite band, that no one has heard of, but I'm sharing their amateurish Soundcloud/Bandcamp here" clutter which will most uncharitably come off as sort of spammy.

There's sooo much music out there in a way that there are only so many feature films and full TV series, and I hate to be gatekeep-y but I think with 0 criteria it could end up with people sharing their Favorite Band that No One Has Heard Of Yet but actually kinda sucks no offense.
posted by windbox at 7:00 AM on June 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

Or, we could not act as gatekeepers, and see if that problem actually develops before we instill rules to stop it. Because, like, FanFare is not exactly overwhelmed with new content other than episode by episode discussions of a few TV shows.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:22 AM on June 1, 2021 [7 favorites]

Huh. I like the idea!

My main thing is electronic music, and I always enjoy the FPPs which explore that genre. (Or, really, family of genres.) I would enjoy exploring specific albums, artists, tracks, subgenres, etc. in a more focused way on FanFare.

I do worry that passionate fans of particular niche interests could irritate others with excessive posting, but there's probably a UI solution to that. (And I guess that problem is hardly exclusive to music – the same applies to existing FanFare categories.)

Discoverability could be an issue. If I'm coming to Fanfare to talk about a movie or TV show, I can just look up that specific thing. But for music, I would want to follow genres more than specific artists. So I hope there would be some way to easily find posts by genre, or otherwise I'd have to skim through a ton of stuff that doesn't interest me to find the stuff that does.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 9:31 AM on June 1, 2021

I like this idea. I don't like the gatekeeping. Surely if it winds up being "people sharing their Favorite Band that No One Has Heard Of Yet but actually kinda sucks" other people can just scroll past.

It's partly anticipation of gatekeeping that keeps me from posting much about music to the Blue. And the response to the posts I've made seems to justify this wariness. Knowing that if I post about Korean music the thread will almost certainly get derailed by some people making the same old arguments about whether Kpop is valid makes me reluctant to share things that I think other people might like.

Trying to boost participation by encouraging people to post while simultaneously saying "but only post the right stuff, the stuff I consider worthwhile" seems doomed to failure.
posted by Lexica at 10:25 AM on June 1, 2021

eotvos - Not to derail but the podcast thing is something I've thought about before and partly what I think it comes down to is how I consume podcasts. I know there are lots of cool things being done with dramatic podcasts and even interactive fiction but for a "mainstream" podcast like say Pod Save America or Planet Money I consume them as a source of information but not something I especially feel like discussing or theorizing about. I just don't have much to say about them. Like. Yes, I enjoyed that, I might repeat an interesting fact from 99% Invisible at a cocktail party but I don't really have an impulse to comment beyond that.

I have no strong preference re: music in Fanfare. It seems like a nice thing to have.
posted by Wretch729 at 11:52 AM on June 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm against, from my perspective would just add more noise. Would there be a way to set up fanfare to only see posts from the mediums readers are interested in? So for example I would just elect to follow film and tv threads and see all film and tv but nothing else.
posted by biffa at 4:24 PM on June 3, 2021

Adding music (which I heartily approve of) could only work if Music was a discrete subsection and not mixed-in with everything else, i.e. tv, movies, books, etc. Items fall off the front page quickly as it is now. Adding what would be a tsunami of music posts would quickly overrun all other media posts.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:06 PM on June 11, 2021 [2 favorites]