Mass media is growing and it’s becoming easier to create anything digital and send it to whoever or wherever in the world within minutes.
With the cultivation and prosperity of social media, it’s possible to share any kind of art medium and have it be viewed by hundreds or thousands with targeted similar interests.
From time to time, any artist can overwork themselves into making mundane, desolate meaningless artwork. That, paired with millions of people doing the same thing, produces thousands of look-a-like, sound-a-like, unimaginative artworks that bury the unique and visionary fine art, music, photography, etc.
There are blogs and social media websites geared toward resolving the issue.
Website, www.thesixtyone.com, does what it can to combat music drones and promote upcoming artists by letting the users decide what’s rockin’ and what’s a flop.
As soon as the page loads, a song is played at random and the user can listen to the song all the way through or “heart” the song. Both of these actions award the song’s artist with popularity and a higher percentage to be played again at random. However, the user is granted only so many “hearts” a day, and it is more like currency than it is a Facebook “Like” button.
Hearts can be earned by completing quests which make it fun to roam around the site and find music in a different way. Just like artists, users can earn a reputation by requesting and “hearting” artists before it makes the top charts. The more reputation one has, the more likely the user’s radio station or “channel” will show up on another user’s recommended section.
Thesixtyone’s relatively small user-base makes it ideal for artists and listener’s to congregate and bounce ideas off each other. As a plus, artists have the choice to allow users to download their music for a small fee, or in most cases for free.
Speaking of free … themusicninja.com is my ultimate site to find absolutely free and legal music. The focus of the blog is to seek and sort out the talent from the auto-tuned and the genuine from the repetitive.
The blog covers indie, folk, electronica, dubstep, trap and hip-hop, with the occasional mash-up/remix. The majority of the music is played through SoundCloud and can be easily downloaded right from the blog.
The Music Ninja can be potentially beneficial to any band looking to promote their sound.
The bloggers welcome new music with open arms, in the contact section it reads, “I listen to every single song I receive and try to reply to as many emails as possible.” So it’s definitely worth a shot. The band could even earn a spot on their “Resident Artist of the Month” page.
