Final Project Proposal: Crowd-Sourced Jukebox

For my final project I’d like to explore enhancing social spaces/experiences through crowd-sourced music selection.

When you’re out and about in the world – bars, restaurants, shops, offices – music is played to set a mood, give character to the environment, and is mostly controlled by the people working at these establishments. What if the choice was in your hands?

Have you been out and heard a song you really didn’t like? What if a song you really like was playing, and someone could affect whether it kept playing – what would you be willing to do to control what music did and didn’t play around you?

I want to explore democratizing – or even exploiting the power for – what music plays in social spaces. My initial idea is empowering visitors through mobile technology to have a say about the music that plays where they are. I have a few ideas, which will become more solid as I do more research, observing, prototyping, etc., but perhaps people check into a place and vote on a song (currently playing, in queue to play) with a simple thumbs up / thumbs down voting system like Pandora. Maybe users create music profiles with favorite genres, artists, songs, etc., which influence what gets played. The algorithm for whether the song plays or not may not be as simple as majority rules – potentially frequent visitors (think mayors on FourSquare) would have a bigger say. Is this a way for businesses to make money (and help recover music licensing fees?) by charging people to add songs to the playlist or cancel a song?*

I’m interested to see what greater social impact emerges from such a system – will it encourage customers to socialize/network with those around them, a goal of FourSquare, but in this case providing a conversation starter about which most people have strong opinions?

possible domains:

• social spaces
• music
• democracy / power
• mobile technology
• crowd-sourcing
• social networks
• identity (individual, group, space)

* I need to consider/research further music licensing and understanding how much businesses pay and what rights/access to they get from ASCAP, BMI, etc.