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Net music innovator and philosopher Lucas Gonze (mentioned on this blog many times, e.g., about net native music) writes in about his new thing:

Hey CC guys, this is a note to announce that my new app is live.

The app:
http://freshhotradio.com

The FAQ:
http://freshhotradio.com/help

What’s special about this is that it’s a mainstream-friendly experience oriented towards casual listeners, but the content is from web-based sources like bulletin boards for musicians to get technical advice on their mixes.

It is deliberate that this is a zero-option experience, unlike Pandora. The experience is modeled after terrestrial radio. You go there and the music just starts, which makes it easier to use and less of a distraction.

Notice that this project has a lot in common with Webjay: it’s about new music, not hits. The content is legal. The curation has a strong identity and voice. The hosting is all deep links. There is an incentive to click through to the song host on whatever web site it came from, and from there to explore the fringes of the music web. You can always download the song. The song is always MP3. The experience is about the browser.

And at the same time, the form is completely different. This is not a social site, and it’s not about listener curation. It is brutally simple — one player page, one playlist, and a static page of documentation.

One way to think of this is Techmeme for music. It’s a single point of entry for the sprawl of web-based music. Another way to think of it is as a netlabel, along similar lines as RCRD LBL. Or maybe it’s a blog crossed with a webcast. Dunno.

It’s important that a lot — but not all — of this music is Creative Commons. What I’m doing to advance the cause is to create an application model that can bring totally unknown CC music to mainstream listeners without having the listeners feel like they’re eating nasty vegetables just for the sake of some abstract good. *But* I’m not slicing the whole problem from the licensing angle but rather than from angle of the originating culture. CC is important because of the ways that it leads to thriving creator communities. And as you’d expect there’s music from Mixter in the new site.

best,
Lucas

Posted 03 March 2009

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