For a while now I’ve been keeping track of Web-based listening/music discovery/remixing etc. applications that I believe have positive implications for and uses in music classrooms. I alluded to some possible uses in a presentation I gave at the New Directions in General Music Conference at MSU earlier this year.
Today the Listening Post featured an interview with the creator of Muxtape one of the applications included in my del.icio.us collection (click on the link in the first paragraph to access it).
I thought this part of the interview was particularly interesting:
One thing I added recently was Amazon affiliate links, and the conversion rate has exceeded my expectations. People are buying music they’re discovering on Muxtape, which is exciting. -Justine Ouellette
While we don’t have statistics, hard data or empirical evidence of what role online listening applications have on music sales, the notion that people will no longer buy music that they can hear for free online can be problematized. It would be interesting to find out how many students use these various applications and what ways they are using them.
Do you use any of them in your classroom?
im a student and i get almost all my music from musgle and bittorrents
Perhaps Im a little late in the comments section; however, online music sales do not yet make up the majority of all music sold. Universal figures that about still about 75% of all music sold is in CD format. I believe this was the report from them that I saw in 2007 through an inside source. This seems to be the trend and perhaps is an odd mix-up of generational issuses as every semester we ask our incoming freshman music industry students how many of them still buy music in CD format it’s almost always total — yet most of the graduate students that I know almost exclusely deal in downloaded goods. Purely speculation… but I bet there’s a weird juxtaposition (younger generations like hard goods and older generations like downloads – obviously stopping with the boomers)
I’ve also done some non-irb research on student’s ipod inventories and it would be my guess that until these online mixing applications become more mainstream then the effect on sales will be minimal if even calculatable.
torrents on the other hand are a whole nother story…