MixedContent

I ran into this very cool post from Joe Lazarus, in which he describes the steps to link last.fm, Pipes, the Yahoo! Media Player and Tumblr together to make your own music site in 10 minutes.

If you follow the clear and straight forward instructions in his example, what you end up with is an automated way to post mp3s to your music blog, based on what you’re playing on your local computer. With the inclusion of the Yahoo Media player on the page, it’s easy to listen to the whole lot through a browser. Pretty neat, for 10 minutes of work!

It’s genius is how it turns the (mostly) passive activity of listening to music into a content creating endeavor (albeit, an automated endeavor). The newest version of the Yahoo player even has a ‘buy’ button, that lets you link in your own Amazon affiliate code. On the Yahoo! Media Player wiki, Lucas Gonze points out:

What’s interesting about this button is that it automates a crucial but neglected part of the ecosystem for net media. Monetization shouldn’t be a manual operation. Music bloggers, for example, usually have a little blurb in their sidebar encouraging visitors to buy recordings associated with the songs they post. They do this out of a kind of musical environmentalism concerned with ensuring a flow of recordings to discover, keep, love, and post. However, it’s a lot of labor for a blogger to set up a purchase link for every track. An upsell link needs to be part of their infrastructure along with comments, RSS, and other basics. With this feature we’re making purchase flows a standard part of the tools for web media.

So every time someone buys a track after listening to it on my Tumblr blog, I get something like a nice shiny nickle. In theory, this means one could get paid to listen to music - truly my dream job. All I need is more traffic, and better taste in music ;)

Thanks Joe!

Check out the end result (still in desperate need of some themeing)
http://music.mixedcontent.com/