TokenBird's Musings

Blip.fm is my new favourite toy. This service is to music what twitter is to words. Tweets are called ‘blips’ and can either be audio tracks or video from youtube. You have listeners rather than followers and favourites rather than being a follower. There is also an ability to give ‘props’ which are rewards to someone for playing music that you like. You can also ‘re-blip’ other people’s songs. The re-blip system is a great way of sharing music.

I spent many a happy hour just listening to music I hadn’t heard in ages and music I had never heard before. It is much better than the majority of music stations which have a narrow band of played music. No annoying DJs to contend with wittering over the intros. No adverts. Bliss. Normal commercial radio also lacks the ease with which a listener can buy a particular song or even know what is playing at any one moment. Many of us have wondered ‘what is this’ and have never had the answer as the song was announced before we started listening or something else dragged us away from the radio at the crucial moment. With blip.fm you can always scroll back and replay any track you liked or go find it in iTunes or on Amazon. These inbuilt links to iTunes and Amazon also offer great commercial potential to support the site and its users. It makes you want to listen to more music and discover new artists which you then are more tempted to buy than if you were bombarded with pop ups or other infuriating advertising.

Via last.fm you can send your currently playing iTunes track to blip.fm using the wonderfully named audioscrobbler. I have yet to try this out but it sounds marvellous. Edit:  I now have tried this and it seems you can send tracks from iTunes to last.fm but those tracks don’t go to blip.fm even if you have linked in your blip.fm account. Ideally I’d like to send tracks straight to blip.fm like you can using TwitTunes to twitter. I have already got my blip.fm account linked to twitter so I could update both at the same time. If it worked… which it doesn’t seem to.

What I would really like to see is something like the Naim HDX/Logitech Squeezebox having blip.fm support so you can listen to streaming music from others easily and also blip what you are playing.  I you already had a track should have the option to play your version as not all the music has the best audio quality.

My blip.fm station: http://blip.fm/stumpy