Matt picks up on the tunA thread, tries to outdo me on the pun front, but more importantly adds some more thoughts around the physical or spatial implications of mobile and wireless file-sharing products (e.g. tunA, or some future iPod with wifi). Where I'd thought of the implications of making the personal sharing visible in crowds or social spaces, Matt notes that a place with its own repository of tunes (in his case, the pizza parlour) lends that place a musical character of sorts ... That each place can further define itself aurally via the tunes that get played and shared there (either amongst the customers or from the owners to the customers.)
"Prototyping "locational" rather than "personal" Tuna might be not only easier and cheaper, but also a more satisfying experience, in that your choices of environment might well give you more luck in discovering music you actually want than walking past total strangers. Fashion stores, record shops and watering holes are perhaps the most obvious: "People who have been in this bar also liked..." You'd perhaps get interesting feedback loops - the most liberal or cutting edge libraries amassing in certain shops or bars, giving them a fleeting reputation or cachet amongst musiclovers or information sharers."
This is a very nice idea. I've written about the relationship between music and place many times, but that's in the sense of a place having an aural structure of feeling i.e. Manchester = Madchester if you're 30; Manchester = The Hollies if you're 50; Manchester = The Hallé; if you're 150. I've further written about wireless access enabling these histories to be browsable/discovered. But this is another step forward - the place defining itself, invisibly and aurally. Like it.
A comment on my previous post about tunA, by chrislunch, further makes the point that coincidence of space does not necessarily mean coincidence of music taste - particularly in tunA's example of a bus journey. Matt indicates there is a little more than coincidence in demarcated social spaces. However, chrislunch would probably point out that people like to rather obviously share listening to a single soundtrack in those spaces, as part of the demarcation process (links to Bourdieu's notions of distinction and habitus spring to mind, had I actually read them ;) Perhaps skaters need the soundtrack to be heard by others walking by, as much as they want to share the experience themselves. I guess the sharing and trading of tunes in the notional model Matt describes can be 'backgrounded', behind the shared soundtrack of the place's hifi system which draws people in and encourages them to have a sniff around with their iPod+ in the first place.
I'd also point out - on the 'unhappy coincidence' point - that Chris Heathcote had originally noted that the model he'd thought of around wireless mobile filesharing would involve collaborative filtering etc., to enable a certain congruence of tastes to emerge out of these invisible collisions. The strangers with strange tastes need not appear on your radar. But the place defining itself adds another layer of sophistication to the process - and emphasises and builds upon social networks that already exist.
