2008: The Year in Online Music
Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired.com discusses the big digital trends in music in 2008 -- like Pandora, Obama songs, MySpace Music and more.
Even as record sales continued to plummet in 2008, the Internet was a hub of innovation for musicians and their fans. In this segment from "Soundcheck," Wired.com's Eliot Van Buskirk talks about some of the highlights for online music in 2008.
Van Buskirk says President-elect Barack Obama's visibility online was an, "... outrageously popular phenomenon ... I posted about one guy who had tracked down the 800 best Obama songs from YouTube -- there were about 30,000 of them."
MySpace Music launched in 2008, and Van Buskirk says, "This is free music really getting real, I mean, people have paid lip-service to this idea that we're not going to pay per-song as much anymore, and we'll end up looking at ads as we enjoy free music rather than enjoying free music without viewing ads ... this was a really landmark moment in 2008 ... you can also create playlists and share those lists with people ...".
Van Buskirk also talks about how Pandora helped him discover new music.
Van Buskirk's list for the best online music stories:
You Tube clip of the year [watch]
MySpace page of the year: the launch of MySpace Music
Best sites to find music BEFORE your friends find it: SeeqPod, Pandora and Hype Machine.
Best sites to find music AFTER your friends find it: Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, LimeWire, instant messenger, anything else that lets people say what they’re listening to in status updates.
Barack Obama songs and John McCain’s spat with Jackson Browne
Guitar Hero’s evolution and its impact on culture
More Metallica scandals (and here)
The My Bloody Valentine reunion tour
Guns N Roses: the leak, the soda giveaway, the Chinese Democracy album finally coming out.
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