What values can digital music service provide for its users? : Social value(2/3)

In analog era before music is fully digitalized from the stage of its creation like now, music had been very personal content for a long time. People used to purchase albums of artists they liked as a type of cassette or LP or CD and listen to them in personal space with home audio system or portable music player like Walkman. The only way of getting information about other people's musical taste is to watch or listen to tradition media channel like TV or radio. In addition, music-related magazine like Billboard could provide chart information only as statistical output of listening-behaviour of the masses.

As web 2.0 world is coming up, which usually brings with some keywords like participation and openness, digital music space starts to make meaningful turn-around in terms of 'socialization'. That is, we came to be able to see and even have experience of other people's musical tastes on the web with the help of tagging.

Most of web 1.0 sites have so-called hierarchy for site visitors to browse and navigate. Music sites have had usually 3-depth or more of hierarchy for its vast catalogue.( 1st depth is genre, 2nd depth is style and the 3rd is sub-style or first is artist and second is album and the third is track) iTunes still has this kind of classification - its own taxonomy. Of course this has some merits like clear edges by expert and predictability. But as active users with their own tastes get in and tagging system is added for supporting them, new user-centric hierarchy, so-called folksonomy, comes up and users are able to give multiple facets to the music according to their own preference and categorize their own music collection for themselves as well.



On top of that, tags( or tag cloud) give another way of browsing and make people have serendipity. Also tags can make users experience new social connectivity to other people linked with certain tag.



Just think about it! If you have special interests in the niche like Korean pop or Buena Vista Social Club in Cuba, you could meet somebody with similar tastes from the other side of the world. Isn't it amazing?