Music for the Masses: An Online “Music Advisory” Service, Pt. 2
Jul 15, 2011In April’s column on setting up an online Music Advisory (MA) service in our library (LJ 4/1/11, p. 66), I left things in a bit of a cliffhanger. Would anyone actually take advantage of this service? With so many more well-known alternatives—Pandora, Amazon, Rhapsody, Myspace, Bandcamp—could we convince people to click through to the library’s website, fill out a survey form, and wait patiently for a response? So far, the answer is yes.
The service was launched at the beginning of February, and usage has grown steadily each month, going from an initial five playlists to a high watermark of 27 playlists in May. People making use of the service thus far are pleased with our recommendations, and we’ve received enthusiastic feedback.
Musical matchmaker
The goal is to match patrons with music in the collection that they might otherwise not have known about through good old-fashioned reference research, and, in that respect, we’ve been successful. I’ve recommended everything from Mercyful Fate and Silver Apples to Yung Joc and the Manhattans. Even reading the playlist requests is fun; people are passionate about the music they love, despite endless pontificating about how video games/Netflix/Facebook/etc., is the new rock’n’roll.
One can’t help but smile at the subjective, though heartfelt, criteria people use to describe the music they want: “I want some new R&B that sounds like R&B that I grew up with in the 1970s,” or “Sometimes I like quiet music to listen to when I’m cooking, but then sometimes I want something with a good beat to tap my feet to when I’m driving.” Then there is the gentleman who specified that the last album he enjoyed was Guns N’ Roses’ Don’t Cry played on the harp!
It’s also interesting to note that younger patrons are more catholic in their musical tastes, as far as not pledging fealty to a particular genre, wanting albums that sound like the Black Keys and Rihanna. However, this can lead to some cognitive dissonance, as when a patron specified not wanting any religious music and yet including two Christian rock bands among five top artists.
Our MA service has attracted people from outside of the library system, which is flattering, though our mission is to get albums from the Jacksonville Public Library’s collection into people’s hands, instead of offering up just general “listen to this!” recommendations.
The library’s PR arm plastered our cassette-style flyer all over the library’s web page, which went a long way toward raising our profile. We even took our little medicine show on the road, promoting the service at the Florida Library Association’s annual conference, and garnered a very positive reception.
Starting out
In case anyone else is planning a similar service, there are a few pieces of advice that would have been helpful to me at the outset. You can thank me later:
• Find bands that sound similar to Train. A lot of them.
• Find singers who sound like Lady Gaga. A lot of them.
• Make sure you have dedicated tech help. Without my collaborator, Andrew Coulon, implementing the MA form and steadily adding goodies like tracking links and a tool for generating album annotations for our blog, this project would be firmly mired in theoryville.
• Have a dedicated email account for receiving and sending out MA playlists.
• Three days’ response time is too optimistic. Five days is more realistic when putting up the accompanying blog posts, especially since creating the posts is what takes up 50 percent of the time of answering a playlist request.
• Have a few music-savvy colleagues on deck to help out. Otherwise, you will quickly be overwhelmed (or worse, if you go on vacation). And make sure they’re really into helping. The idea of doing music advisory is intriguing. The reality is often more work-intensive, especially after the fifth time you need to find someone else who sounds like Keri Hilson.
As a postscript, I offer this little anecdote Andrew told me after browsing through our library’s new OverDrive-provided digital music/video collection. The catalog entry for a documentary about David Bowie’s classic, elegant, adventurous “Berlin Trilogy” of albums had an “If You Like This” link prominently recommending a quickie doc on flash-in-the-pan fratpunks Blink 182 called Punk Poets. Yikes! Good news everyone. We’re still necessary!
| Author Information |
| Matthew Moyer, Reference Librarian, Popular Media Department, Jacksonville Public Library, FL, also blogs Music for the Masses at www.libraryjournal.com |
