Love Music

Hey I know, let’s try and design a really cool music exploration/discovery thing using computers and what not!

I’ve been meaning to start this project properly for about 30 years. It’s not a unique basic idea, so lots of other people in the meantime have done lots of wonderful things so I’m going to have to see what they’ve done first.

Broadly you’ve got your big list of tunes, and your spreadsheet (a list with more metadata in extra columns). You’ve got your wonderful visual maps or connections and thematic neighbours, great fun. Think solar systems, or atoms.

[ sketch of these main UIs]

Now, I’ve actually done one or two small things in this space myself over the years. One was an extrapolation of Zune on Windows 7, so that dates me to 2008 or 2009. What if… big Surface interactive table, and deep dives into digital box-sets and themes. Looked a bit like this:

[ microsoft B&O UI loop]

Which a few years later led to some work with the last remaining British major record label EMI Music which was some of that user need explored as a deep dive properly, with real catalogues of out-takes and archives. We built a John Lennon experience for his 70th birthday.

[ walkthrough of the Lennon Universe movie]

Earlier versions, including a DevFort prototype, took an almost day-by-day diary approach, which we had the content for. Incredible detail.

[ anything from that if we have it ]

Leading up to that, I’d made a concept video of a digital box set that worked with social glances, playlists, deep content. Pretty but quite a linear bexed product, with a price tag on it.