the one about the music blog idea

Over the last few days I've been thinking (in my spare time) about possible models for viral marketing of new music. I've come up with one idea I'd like to throw out there and see what people think.

What if there was some way for people to publish new entries to their playlist as an RSS feed?

I'm sure I'm not unique in that I have some friends who have the same taste in music as I do. When they discover some new artist they are excited about, there's usually a good chance I will enjoy it as well (and vice versa). What if there was some easy way for them to publish these new artists they add to their playlist as an RSS feed which I could subscribe to? And what if all music fans had a dedicated playlist RSS feed? I need some way to find out what other bloggers are listening to (and I don't just mean listening to RIGHT NOW, but who their top ten favourite artists are) and then I would know they have similar tastes to mine and I would subscribe to their playlist RSS feed. It would make discovering new music a lot easier (and less expensive for the artists).

My ultimate model right now would be to subscribe to a service (for, say, $10 per month) that would PUSH new music to me. I'd love to be able to dock my Digital Music Player each night to re-charge, and have a service check my playlist, look at how I've rated the artists in the playlist, and then figure out a new artist I might like to listen to. It would be really cool if they would then download 3 - 5 tracks from that artist onto my music player, giving me permission to listen to them a handful of times. If I liked the tracks, I would then buy them for $1 each. If not, I'd delete them.