Internet Gumbo

I’m really interested in user determined media playlist/line-ups, for example radio stations and television stations. This interest has drawn me to online systems like LAST.FM. Systems like this ideally create a bunch of small niche stations based on user favorites or user tagged audio tracks.

Growing up I was a huge fan of rap music and my brother and I would run home in the summer and after school by 4 o’clock to watch YO MTV Raps. We ran mostly because this was the only time MTV played hip-hop and most of the 30 minutes of music was filled with commercials. Currently one of my favorite radio stations (based in New Orleans) is WWOZ http://www.wwoz.org which is a non-profit volunteer run radio station. While volunteer based stations do play music of choice by users and not music promoted by record labels, unfortunately you can’t have your entire audience in the studio all at once trying to all pick which music plays next. Systems like LAST.FM allows everyone to be in the studio but they each have their own frequency. So I want to create ONE radio station where the music is selected by the user all at once.

So how do you get a room of people to determine what music gets played? In the proposed system most of the interaction will revolve around the music queue.

1. Any user can submit a track to the queue

2. If the track is already in the queue then the track will not be added to the queue but a vote up will be given to track from the user who attempted to submitted track.

3. Each track starts at the bottom of the queue

4. Each user gets one vote to vote a track up or down the queue

5. If there is no tracks in the queue the user: d.j. robot will add random tracks to the queue for users to vote on.

Because users may not be familiar with some of the tracks submitted to the queue they will be allowed to play a sample of each track in the queue - individually.

Also, when a user votes a track up or down they can leave comments (debate) on the track.

The commenting allows a form of debating and the moving up and down the queue allows a form of voting. Unlike a chieftain system, one person is not selecting what gets played. I can also see groups developing within the society that will use their power as a group to vote songs up and down the queue. I also think the type of music being played will be different depending who’s online voting.