It’s been annoying me for some time now that all the previews for music online are less than a minute long, and usually even only 30 seconds – not nearly enough to get a good idea of a song never mind like it enough to but it. And if you have diverse music tastes and want to share that music with other people, you would have to send them to all kinds of different websites, who has time for that?

I figured with all the wonderful and powerful web 2.o applications for music out there,
one of them would enable me to do this simple aim of sharing my current favorite songs with friends and people I’m working with. So I signed up with MOG.com, Last.FM, iLike.com, facebook, and the iTunes music store, and wasted a bunch of time checking out all they could do. I started with 5 songs from the last 20 years, some brand new top 40, some older, some obscure. All these sites either didn’t have *all* the songs I wanted to share, or if they did have them, some songs only allowed a 30 second preview. 30 seconds is like a slap in the face to the music lover. It’s just an insult.

A large part of the problem in being able to ‘legally’ achieve my simple aim to share music with friends is that record companies prevent this from happening because they don’t understand the new music 2.0 movement and the concept of ‘giving consumers what they want’.

The only application I found that showed some promise in my efforts to promote commercial artists is Simplify Media‘s free beta iTunes Music sharing software. It let’s you share any music you want with any other iTunes user who is also running the simplify media software and has set up an account. I just tested it with my friend Elika all the way over in Beijing, and within seconds of connecting, she could play in real time any non protected MP3 I shared with her, even those encoded at 320k!

In some ways It’s not an ideal solution since your friends would have to download and configure the software to listen to your shared music. It would be better to just be able to go to a social networking site and select FULL length versions of any song and send a link to someone of your playlist. But since the music industry won’t yet allow that, Simplify Media is still very cool and may avoid me having to share my music ‘illegally’ which I was prepared to do if I had to. Try it out, and then let me know when you have it installed and I’ll invite you to my playlist.

Those of you I work with and who are dedicated to their music have probably heard from me about the essential and free resource, “20 Things You Must Know About Music Online”, an eBook by UK researcher, author and music educator, Andrew Dubber who has an excellent industry blog of his own.
For anyone involved in music in any way, or even small business, this is essential reading to get caught up with the new Music 2.0 movement, and to learn the tools and techniques that can help you make the most of the massive changes that are happening in the music industry. Download a copy right now here: 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online – PDF

People like Andrew that are out there make up for decades of secrecy, exclusivity, and abuse that has gone on in the industry.
There are new DIY stories every day of individuals who are using these techniques to succeed without the need for any corporate interest, or outside funding, and it’s interesting to see the reactions of the big music corporations, dissing these independant artists in one breath, and then all chasing after them in another like little puppy dogs with their tounges wagging. Talk about a massive role reversal!
Case in point: electro pop band Shiny Toy Guns.