Blip—The Twitter for Music

Blip was announced on May 9 as an extension of the Fuzz community. Fuzz is a music company that combines a label with a platform for artist promotion to active fans, as well as other artists.

While there really is only room for one Twitter-esque service in my life—despite having accounts in Pownce, Jaiku, BrightKite and others—I like the specific focus of this Blip implementation. It is about sharing music, building a personal library, and discovering new music through the activity of others. It is also building the short-message communication channel around an existing community, giving existing members a new way to interact while opening the possibility of the experience spreading virally to bring more people into the Fuzz fold.

I’m speculating on how effective this is going to be for me. I’m not one to listen to music online. I’ve got my safe collection of tunes, and I worry whenever my MacBook starts revving up the fan … a common response to visiting multimedia web sites. Blip isn’t presenting itself in that way, with very quick plays and only a little fan action (on initial loads of new music). I’m not getting the social effect at the moment due to Erik being the only one in my music network, and I’m not even certain I connected to his profile correctly—instead of “friends” one has “favorites.” I’m anxious to see if I can let the channel play in the background and hear the music others feed me. Assuming that happens, this could change the way I listen to music.

Blip passed two of my early tests easily. First, it has a sufficient sampling of Bob Schneider to scratch that itch. Boomshuffle, my most recent foray into online music, didn’t have enough Bob stocked out of the box to make it valuable. Second, it gave me something unexpected. One of my favorite performers is Stevie Ray Vaughan, a Texas guitar slinger who died at Alpine Valley, Wisconsin in 1990. I was there, also loving the rest of the bill, which included Eric Clapton, Robert Cray and Buddy Guy. A search for SRV gave me his final jam, with all of the great guitarists playing Sweet Home Chicago. After a while, I switched to the all blips channel and just let it play.

The Fuzz Manifesto

There is also a local music component to Fuzz. Bloomington, Indiana isn’t on the radar, but who knows what might happen if enough locals register and make the request to support our city’s musicians. Integration with Twitter and BrightKite—the location-based microblogging service—wouldn’t be a stretch and could give local H-T blogger Junebug Jenkins even more to write about.