The Other Side Of Content Resolution

Of course I want to share links to songs and not worry what music service other people are using, but I’m just one person. The flip side is about artists that want to share links for their music to the widest possible audience and not worry whether someone uses iTunes, Spotify, or Amazon to get their music.

Bop.fm has been testing the waters and doing just this. The service, which shares a universal link to multiple content sources, has been providing links and testing partnerships with artists like Jason Mraz and Hot Chelle Rae, among others.

Did you notice the Grammys created playlists for each category and used Bop.fm to do it. Why? To reach the largest audience the awards show either has to choose the biggest media service, most likely iTunes, or it has to stay agnostic and cast a wide net. Using something like Bop allows companies and services a chance to incorporate more content without excluding some users.

I still think content resolution, like a Spotify link routing to Rdio, is necessary for the music industry to grow, but it’s hard to see a feature like that catching on without big companies using it too and pushing it as well.

Originally I imagined things like Twitter clients implementing the ubiquitous sharing feature and turning it into a check box in the settings menu. What better place for links to automatically resolve with your personal preferences than social networks? In reality though, it’s unlikely to ever be a a massively popular feature direct to consumers.

As a consolation prize, however, it’ll still benefit users directly to have artists and other entities sharing links that don’t favor Android over iOS, iTunes over Amazon.

And the business model for facilitating an agnostic way to share links? That’s yet to be seen though whoever has access to what’s being shared also has a wealth of power.