Bijan Sabet

What should a music social network look like?

How I experience music these days hasn’t changed much over the past few years.

It’s still mostly a combination of folks I follow on Tumblr and Twitter. I also find out about new bands from the Hype Machine. And I get my social radio fix from last.fm.

The new thing in the mix for me is Extension.fm which I’ve written about before.

And I love all of these services. They are simply amazing.

However, I’m wondering if this mix of tools is the right approach or does a more focused service need to exist to be laser focused on providing the best social network experience for music.

Right now, last.fm does a great job keeping track of my music playback history with their scrobbler. It works across multiple third party services and that data is pure gold.

But there isn’t a timeline. The logged in home page doesn’t look social even though there is a lot of social stuff built into the guts of the service like friends and neighborhood radio..

Here’s what the last.fm home page looks like:

That’s not the timeline or dashboard interface I’ve come to love from my favorite social nets.

There are also a variety of other tools out there that keep track of stuff my friends buy or consume (think Blippy). When a friend of mine buys a new record, shouldn’t that stuff show up in a music social net timeline? Or when they heart their favorite track on hypem or tumblr. Or when they see a live show?

I think there is a lot of opportunity to create a lightweight, simple & focused music social network that does a few things right and supports other services too.

The danger is that it becomes a dysfunctional swiss army knife which would be a missed opportunity.