A lot of discussion about why tags are so useful (folksonomies is the current buzzword) on Many2Many. As I noted in a previous post, at the moment there are services that allows you to tag: URLs (del.icio.us), photos (flickr), your emails (gmail), posts on metafilter (metafilter), posts on your blog (technorati, using <a ref="tag">), scientific papers (citeulike), todo items (43things) and books (bookswelike, which I just discovered).
But what we would really really really enjoy is MUSIC TAGGING!
So, is there a site where it is possible to apply free tags to songs? And to collections of songs? I’m not aware of such a site. I mean totally free tags (such as PsyChill or MaleNeuvoFolk) to express your personal categorization of a set of songs and not ID3 tags.
I think WebJay should be our friend here. Let me first say that I’m in total love with webjay, a site that helps you listen to and publish web playlists, i.e. collections of mp3s (and other formats) available on the web. Here are my webjay playlists.
So, coming back to the subject of the post, I definitely think we would enjoy a free-tagging music site and I think WebJay is the best candidate and Lucas Gonze (the developer of webjay) totally rocks. Anyway, Seb (@WJ) was arguing on webjay forum some time ago that “Webjay Needs Tags” and the entire discussion (7 posts) is really interesting. Lucas is not that convinced since he argues that playlists and tags are very different metaphors and very different organizing principles and also that “WJ is radically constrained by the lack of money”.
I think tags could be applied both to playlists (I tag this playlist as “mellow”) and single songs (I tag this song as “PsyChill”). Both ways seems appealing to me about what they can produce, for example: “let me see all the playlists tagged as ‘mellowblues’ or “i’ve 30 free minutes, play me a collection of ‘coldrelax’ songs”). The good of tags is that they are not imposed from the top (i agree with riddle (@wj) when he says “I’m glad that you didn’t impose a preconceived notion of genre on Webjay”) but they emerge from the bottom. Lastly, hideout (@WJ) proposes to use del.icio.us system to tag playlists since every playlist has a permanent URL. This can be a low-impact-on-webjay solution and very small-pieces-loosely-connected one and i definitely think it can make sense. Maybe it would be better if Lucas integrates the remote tagging made on del.icio.us on WebJay interface in order to make it in some way visible and promote its usage.
What do you think? Want to share your point of view? You can either do it on WebJay Forum or with a comment here. Music free tagging is the next step! [ehm, I think I’m not good in inventing new words … so i leave to you the option to invent the new cool buzzword for music-free-tagging].