Minds & Music

"Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts." - Billy Joel

Minds & Music: A romance that could be.

So a long time ago, back in August of 2017, I wrote a blog on Minds about what I would love to see incorporated for musicians. Within this blog I wrote about the exciting prospects and future for Minds and how I hope Minds would incorporate some functionality for musicians. I wrote about how in 2017 Myspace was still considered a contender for viable social media for musicians to pursue. Things have changed in 2019 but the sentiment of my last post remains the same.

It was pretty badass when both @john and @ottman commented on that blog, mentioning an audio/visualizer coming! Boy, was I stoked to hear about the upcoming music and blogging functionality, built into a neat little A/V package. I immediately recalled how Myspace had Myspace Music, and how all of those musicians brought a ton of culture to the site. I remembered how it felt like Myspace Music was, in its own right, a community where indie and large artists alike could connect with fans. 

Myspace now, broken image links and all. ...And facebook could give a damn about music.

2019.....this site has come a long long way

Minds is cool. Lots of expressive freedom, and a sense that it isn't some giant corporate conglomerate trying to police thought and control speech. Open source code is awesome, all of it is pretty rad. I see that a lot of creatives use this platform as a method of launching into social media with their brands. That's amazing and good news. I believe this builds culture which brings in a following.

But all that being said, i feel this site still lacks tools that could help foster and grow user development. At the top of this blog post I created a crudely GIMP'd image of one step Minds could take to isolate interests groups into more structured and easily accessible clickable links. Giving the normal user the ability to perhaps subscribe to different possible subdomains within the site would be really handy. If users enjoy long form conversations, blogs, vlogs, and more, they could add it to their bar. Instead of searching through your site by looking through hashtags, centralized locations of content could help steer users towards where the musicians, artists, bloggers want them.

Another Impassioned Plea...

Understandably as a musician I could create a video with my music, and upload that video to the video section of Minds. But I don't think this serves as the best platform for someone who is just a musician and might not have video capabilities, as well as users who just want to stream music in the background. 

I think a quick embedded player of some sort would work just fine. Perhaps a page that a musician could embed sources from other sites if data/storage is an issue. Myspace had a way to easily upload music and it would display in an easily accessible audio visual playlist. Even something basic like this would be really handy for musicians on Minds to utilize. Users could possibly select tracks from a variety of artists across the site. Maybe music profiles on the site could be set up to work well as a social media aggregate page for artists? Just tossing out some possible ideas.

Made it this far? Awesome, thank you!

I'll end with this

This site is cool. I think the watered down PC corporate hellscape that is Facebook sucks. I'm a musician, and I'm on the constant search for the best platforms to try and build audiences on. Minds fits the bill on what how I view social media companies should behave, open and transparent. That's why, even back in 2017, I was promoting this site to friends and pushing for it's success. But I would like to see more music incorporation.

By the way you can check out my music HERE!