late, but happy, at the blip party
I’ve been ignoring all my twitter friends’ blip-tweets (bleets?) for the last few months. Dunno why. Maybe a misplaced loyalty to last.fm, or an unreasonable dedication to my own iTunes. But now I’ve been caught. So this is just a little post in praise of blip.fm.
I’m not going to review Blip, as I won’t say anything that hasn’t been said already in Iain Tait’s excellent post last August; this is mostly a love letter. Because what it does is take a vital social function of music and throw it open to the chattersphere.
Once upon a time, people got together to sing songs. With the hit parade, this shifted: people (especially teenagers) have gathered together to share music. With the inception of Limewire, Kazaa, iTunes, YouTube, Spotify and the other sources of easily-downloadable music, the potential scope of conversations mediated by music is no longer limited by how many records/tapes/CDs you can each carry. But the core activity is the same: I play you a tune, you play me a tune, there’s maybe a bit of talking around it but the music works as a conversation.
Fooling around on Spotify or my own iTunes, and hearing a particular tune, I’ve often thought suddenly of a friend and wanted to send them that tune. It’s a way of saying ‘This reminds me of you’, knowing you’ll get the nodding head and smile of recognition. Music does that. It’s as evocative as a scent, as personal in its references.
And the genius of Blip is that now I can. And even better: I can tell the world what’s happening in my personal soundtrack, and I can watch a stream of personal picks from people around the world. Of my two current favourite DJs, one is in Yemen and the other somewhere in Latin America. The stream bounces me tunes that I wouldn’t necessarily think of on my own, that would never be suggested to me by an auto-generated feed with parameters defined by me, and that - perhaps because of that - makes me utterly totally happy.
Left to my own (and last.fm’s) devices, my listening habits tend towards heavy electro type stuff. But there’s so much more out there. And because on Blip it’s all recommended by someone, because I can browse, test-drive a tune, nose around in the public stream and in a defined stream of my own favourites, I’m exploring music as I never have done before. I’m discovering things about my own taste that would never have occurred to me. And I can share them as well.
Where before I might sit around in the kitchen with a couple of friends, taking turns to find and share a tune in a conversation of maybe 3 or 4 people, now I’m having that conversation with the whole world. Amazing.
