It takes two to Jango

All it takes is an artist and a listener, and you have Jango: an internet-based radio station that brings artists and listeners together.

As a listener, you just type in the name of an artist you like and it will start playing their music, completely legally – and free. What makes Jango different is that it inserts into your personalised radio station similar favourites chosen by other Jango users who share your musical tastes. You can further tailor what your station plays by adding more artists and rating songs that you want to hear more or less.

In the United States alone there are seven million unique visitors a month. That makes it very appealing for a budding artist to upload their music to the Jango network. What the artist gets is rapid access to a community of people who like listening to exactly the kind of music the artist creates. Without Jango, it could take a lot longer for an artist to reach out and find its audience.

You could say it’s a bit like computer dating which matches your profile against compatible profiles of potential suitors… except in the world of Jango the resulting relationship is a much more straightforward one-dimensional affair. In Jango-land, you are brought together because you already like each other. No need to meet up for lunch to check each other out: it’s a done deal.

This creates for the artist a challenge – listener feedback. And it’s a big challenge, because an emerging artist has two primary objectives: firstly, to find an audience, and secondly, to get constructive feedback so they can gauge how best to develop their talent.

Jango gets you an audience, and pretty much immediately. But that audience is about as unbiased as a BMW salesman telling you what make of car to buy. A Jango listener will, by definition, think your style of music is wonderful, precisely because ‘your style’ is ‘their style’. For a Jango listener to proactively advise you to consider doing something a bit different is like a BMW salesman recommending you go to a Mercedes dealership to get a better car. It’s just not going to happen.

What an artist can do, though, is upload multiple songs, and thereby see which ones are played more often – and voted for – compared to others. But what does this really mean? Given that in Jango-land an artist can always find a listener, then it follows that no matter how good or bad your song really is, Jango will find someone who really likes it.

So, it takes two to Jango, but quite another to see whether the performance is any good or not.