Social Media Vocabulary: Social Media Meets Music

Ah, Tuesday. The day all the new albums come out. It’s a day I wait for every week for two reasons, the new music and the new Salty Waffle social media vocabulary. Today it’s all in one baby.

1. Ping: Ping is a social network built within iTunes that is all about music. You can update friends via Ping and it also recommends new music you might enjoy.
2. iconcertcal: This is a personal little secret of mine, but it’s starting to grow into the public eye. It is a plug-in for iTunes that crawls through your library and then builds you a calendar of upcoming CD releases and concerts dates by your artists.
3. Rap Genius: A very helpful site in helping to understand references from the world of hip hop. Kind of like a wikipedia for rap lyrics, the community works together to “translate” lyrics into regular language and even explain obscure references.
4. The Hype Machine aka Hypem: This is an mp3 blog aggregator that is powered by the social community. The blog pulls in mp3 files from all over the internet and displays them on the page. As users rank and listen to the tracks they move up or down in popularity accordingly.
5. Last.fm: Can’t go without mentioning the biggest social network out there built around music. Last.fm centers on scrobbling (tracking what you listen to on your computer) your music and presenting a listening history to you and other users. It can then compare your musical taste to others, display your concert plans, and provide other social networking services like those found on Facebook.