Curation Culture

Social Media Pioneer badge application:

A social-media network that many people don’t seem to know about yet is 8tracks.com.  We all know about Pandora and how it works, but unlike Pandora, 8tracks is a social media network. 8tracks allows its users to create playlists and listen to the playlists of others.  Not only can the user create playlists, but the creator can tag the playlist that he or she has created using a combination of moods so that someone who was looking for a playlist that would relate to their mood, could easily do so.  After you have typed in your mood of choice, many playlists pop up.  To see all the tags for the playlist you simply hold your mouse over the playlist icon.  This also should have many plays and likes the mix has.  Then, once you have chosen a playlist and clicked on it, the length of the mix and the number of tracks in the mix are shown under the title and artist of the track currently playing.  There is also a little star you can click on where you can “favorite” and individual track and this track will be put into your “favorite tracks” folder.  Or, if you decide that the whole playlist is good and you would like to have easy access to it, you can like the playlist and it will show up on your own profile as, for example, “mixes liked by tteemss.”  You can also see the people you are following on your profile along with any mixes you have made.

I have been using 8tracks to listen to music for a couple years, but only recently created a profile and my first playlist.  The users of 8tracks know that their mixes will be listened to not only by people who have an account with 8tracks, but also by those who don’t.  People just looking for music to fit with their mood.  These people, like myself may either create and share a playlist for their own use and then hope that others enjoy their music.  I know when I was creating a playlist I started thinking, “what if no one listens to it,” or worse, ” what if everyone who listens to it, hates it.”  I admit, I was kinda nervous about what songs to upload, but in the end I decided that I had to just make a mix that I enjoyed.  The users of this site take time to create playlists and carefully choose tags so that they will be more easily accessible.  I first thought, well it can’t be that hard.  It probably doesn’t take them any time at all, but I was surprised.  It took about forty-five minutes to actually complete my playlist of eighteen songs.  I also found out that there are rules such as no more then two songs by the same artists or from the same album, there must be at least eight tracks, you must have a cover photo, a title, a description, and at least two tags.

Before I was introduced to 8tracks, I mainly used Pandora to listen to music, but 8tracks is a more interesting sight than Pandora because the playlists do not all necessarily contain similar artists. They just contain songs that have a similar mood or feeling.  Also, it is interesting that other people make the playlists and are not generated by a computer.  Human experiences go into choosing songs that represent certain moods or ideas to create playlists on 8tracks.