Mobile Music, Community and Social Media

Let's face it. Communities are difficult at the best of times. But since the very beginning of mobile music users and developers have formed and grown their own communities. Now with  social media community gets easier in many ways, but also it becomes more difficult.

You might be wondering why I'm posting about mobile music and community. It's a fair question. Now more than ever I think that community and social sharing is important for music, not just mobile music either.

Plenty has been done in communities and social media within the mobile music community, but I'd like to spend a little time exploring what it means and where it might go next.

It seems like these days every developer has a forum and a Facebook page and at least one twitter account. Many have multiple twitter accounts each one dealing with its own app and often a Facebook page per app and that's ignoring the explosion of soundcloud groups that are available either per app or for numerous other groups too. So with this proliferation of information sources what do we get? Confused possibly?

There are so many ways to share and post sounds, music and what you're doing with it. It has become confusing. So what kind of connections between mobile music and social media make sense and what doesn't.

I can understand sharing options like the ones in SoundCloud on uploading tracks, but I can think of a whole load more and I don't really understand why these aren't in more apps.

We seem to share virtually everything these days, from pictures with apps like instagram to our own location through foursquare. So why don't we extend the social sharing in music making apps in more ways? Location is something that I think is wholly underused in music making app, although I'm pleased to see RJDJ's Project Now app is on the way through the Apple review process now.

Location would make sense in mobile music in a big way. I'd personally find it very useful to be able to collect projects by location and see a map of where I'd worked on a track. It would be really interesting to see the locations that made more creative sense for me, and to take it a step further it would be interesting to see where other people found their best inspiration.

But as we share so much of what we do on a constant basis, from where we've bought coffee to what we're eating for lunch, why can't we do this with music making as well? Why don't apps let you tweet or post what you're doing in them as you're doing it? Making a patch, mixing a track, etc. Apart from being good ongoing PR for the developer it could also be a good way to share tips and knowledge as you go through working with your music.

So, there are a few thoughts on community and social media. I'd like to see more sharing and better ways to interact, although that veers into collaboration and that's a topic for another day entirely.

Let me know what you think.