Music / Media / Social - Where are and where we should go

It is social media day so I thought I'd take this opportunity of looking at how mobile music making apps have integrated with social media so far, and what possibilities lie ahead.

Quite a few mobile apps have integrated with social media on the iPhone. Apps like Touch DJ which let you connect to facebook and twitter to say what you're mixing, or PianoStudio, which lets you post your track to twitter, facebook or share via email. Then there's Mixtikl 2 which converts a whole mix into a character string that can be pasted into twitter and anyone can listen to it online.

There are plenty more examples, and lots of good uses of social media in those apps, but essentially our use of social media inside apps is sharing of either what you're doing creatively or the output of what you're doing creatively, and I think that there's a lot more potential to be had.

I think that projects like Genomestudio are moving in the right direction. Real time collaboration and sharing of musical ideas as they are forming is where I see musical social media going in the future.

I was really excited by the OhmStudio, but I think that mobile devices should be an integral part of this kind of exchange and collaboration. There have been a few concept devices around this idea, but nothing concrete as yet with the exception of Genomestudio.

Current social media sites like facebook, twitter and others aren't really geared towards this kind of collaborative approach to sharing. The closest thing so far is Thounds, which does have a Thounds app for the iPhone. Perhaps there's is a platform that could be built upon for real time collaboration using mobile devices with the ability to locate and connect with musicians around you to collaborate and share ideas and composition.

But is it too much to ask for? Social media is still evolving as is mobile music creation. My hope is that the two together could provide the tools and platforms to enable musicians to not only be able to be creative wherever they are, but also to find and collaborate with other musicians on an ad hoc basis.

We'll see what the future holds.