MySpace is my DJ

Playing music as a game.

Milan currently works on something, which might be tagged as “myspace art generative cool” when finished. He is going to show his work at an exhibition in Hamburg at the end of february. For the opening event I plan to DJ with music embedded in MySpace only.

The Rules

• Play only songs which are available on MySpace user pages
• The next song to play has to be on a friend’s page of the former user
• Log the URLs of songs played from

The Idea

What seems to be a corset for free selection of tracks and good dj flow in playing music for the crowd leeds to some interesting points:

• Limitation of Means Leads to More Fun: I’m good in playing tabletop football and I like to play it a lot. But from time to time playing gets boring, not making any progress at having the same style and tricks for too long. Limitation of means – play with one arm only, don’t score midfield player, .. - increases my fun by giving me a new challenge.
• Few and Strict Rules Boost Ambitions: There are many different intentions to DJ - make people dance, feel good, give them new impulses - just to mention a few. But there are no written rules. Games in contrast have to give a clear goal and a set of rules to care about. Well defined rules as a frame for the game help me to be more ambitious.
• Music as Social Factor: There is nothing new in claiming music as an import factor for group-building processes. Using MySpace as a DJ-tool is about exploring the music of a friend and his friends.
• Reverse last.fm: One part of last.fm is to bring people with similar music tastes together. Using MySpace as DJ is kind of a reverse last.fm: Not using songs to connect people, but using people to connect songs.

Tecnical Barriers

To get this idea work it needs some hacks to get rid of technical limitations:

• Songs are played automatically: MySpace Flash-based audio-player starts playing songs immediately after opening a new page in most cases. This will mess up the currently played song by mixing both tunes together when exploring the friends pages to find the next song. A tool thats allows to turn off the sound of a certain window or tab would help a lot. For now the FlashBlocker extension does a good job.
• Complicated Surfing: Most MySpace pages are bloated with many embedded Flash files and too much graphics, which increases the download time of a page and makes my computer slow. It might get annoying to visit a bunch of friends before finding a new song. The selection of the next song would be much easier having the information if a user has a song on its page or not before surfing to that users page. For now I have no solutions how to access this information earlier.
• Dead Ends: Users with no or few friends might end the music session early in case they link to no new songs. It would be great to see the number of friends a user has, before surfing to his profile page. I hope the party won’t stop in an early dead end.

The Result

I’ll post a playlist - better - a list of user names after the first MySpace is my DJ Session.

The end is near, now what to do?

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