Corndog megaband Blink-182 is the latest popular culture phenom to hop aboard the social web gimmick train, partnering with geodata provider SimpleGeo and cloud music service SoundCloud to serve up new music in a cool experience. As promotion for the band’s forthcoming next album, a new microsite called Neighborhoods.Blink182 now allows fans to listen to previews of the music and chat along with other people in the same offline neighborhood they are in. SimpleGeo helps determine the name of the neighborhood that matches your physical location and SoundCloud serves up the music.
The Next Web’s Drew Olanoff says “it’s a similar listening and chat experience to what you’d find on Turntable.fm” and while I can see why he’d say that, it doesn’t feel that cool to me. It’s one band, listeners are unable to listen to the full songs Update: apparently I was wrong about that and songs are available in full, there’s no creative control on the part of DJs. But yes, you can listen together with people near you. Geographic proximity could be a cool addition to Turntable.fm, in fact.
When it comes to music, plus location plus technology, Arcade Fire’s HTML5 collaboration with Google Chrome last Summer was much cooler.
What Blink-182 has done has interesting potential though and is worth a brief look. I think it falls short of creating the kind of experience that visitors will feel compelled to share with friends though. I like the idea of listening to music with people near me, but not this music and not short clips like this.
Below, poor Google Chrome got my location very, very wrong. I’m a long way from LA.
