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JamJunky - Song Writing and Independent Music Sharing Gone Social

Friend of TechFold James Thomas today launched his latest project: JamJunky - a tool & community for songwriters. Allen at CenterNetworks beat me to the punch, with JamJunky coverage here. JamJunky provides a means to organize your work (lyrics, tab, mp3’s), and a forum to solicit feedback - from a select group, or the whole community.

The Community Side: Browse music & artists.

Anyone can browse public songs & artists, play or download MP3’s (great in-browser player, btw), and leave comments. You can list songs by Genre (which loads with a nice AJAX implementation), and order them by title, artist, or popularity (listens).

Once you find a song, you’re taken to its page:

Each song page includes the aforementioned in-browser player/downloader, as well as a comment form, lyrics & chords, other song info you may have entered (key, tempo, etc.), and licensing options.

Its deliciously fast and easy to play a song and comment on it.

The Tool: Add your own music.

Adding a song is a simple process which allows you to add as much or as little info as you please. The most standout part of the process is the Lyrics and Chords section: if you choose to enter both (as opposed to just lyrics), you’re presented with a blue and white tab sheet which actually makes entering chords and their corresponding words very easy to do.

This is a key point: JamJunky is designed with the user in mind - i.e.: someone at home with a guitar, working out a song - not a virtuoso orchestral conductor building a symphony. Have you ever used PowerTab? Great features, but way too intense an application for the casual songwriter - IMHO, JamJunky has found a great balance point.

A final note on the tool side: JamJunky has awesome “ownership controls.” CC licesning options, download control, share scope (friends? everyone?), etc: it all adds up to a tool that is very musician-friendly, offering different ways to balance openness with property protection.

Suggestions

JamJunky is days old, so I’m sure some of these are being worked on, but I’ll throw them out there anyway.

Facebook-style “Activity” feed: Adding individual RSS feeds for songs or artists would be good, but potentially overwhelming if you wanted to follow a bunch of contemporaries. A network activity tracker that aggregated activity for everyone you followed into a single summary page and RSS feed would do the job.
Group options: People love to be a part of things. Build out an infrastructure to enable user-managed groups, and see what pops up. “Chicago Blues Guitarists,” for example, would be a great way for musicians with common interests to meet their contemporaries and set up in-person jam sessions.
Printable tab: Let me output those chords & lyrics and a nice jam session-friendly format and I’ll be really pumped.

That’s it in a nutshell - JamJunky is a great tool targeted at a great niche, which has been under-served by online applications to date. It has a great launch feature set, and I have no doubt that there are more great ideas in the pipeline.

Congrats, Jimmy!

artists, creativecommons, guitar, guitartab, jamjunky, music, musicians, songs, songwriting tab

2 Responses to “JamJunky - Song Writing and Independent Music Sharing Gone Social”

Jimmy | May 28th, 2007 at 11:12 pm

Awesome article guys, thanks a ton.

Those are great suggestions. The print chords/lyrics is the best idea I’ve heard yet. As you can guess there are a million and one ways to take this site as far as features go… but that one is so obvious. Look for it this week.

Thanks again!

Jimmy
Skinnyr.com for Sale « TechFold | June 25th, 2007 at 10:58 pm

[…] got an email from James Thomas (of JamJunky fame) that one of his other projects - skinnyr has both had a version upgrade, and been put up for […]