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Media delivery service Fluence launches

By | Published on Wednesday 29 October 2014

Fluence

After several months in beta, new content submission service Fluence has gone live. Set up by Topspin co-founder Shamal Ranasinghe, the site allows creators (musicians, say) to share their content (music, I guess) with ‘curators’ (maybe bookers, A&Rs, radio types and, of course, journalists).

The idea is that creators get access to people they think would be interested in what they do, and the ‘curators’, who presumably are interested in accessing good, new, relevant content, are able to “manage demands on their time”. And those demands can be managed by charging the creators for that time (payment that can be donated directly to charity if the curator so chooses).

Writes Ranashinghe in a blog post explaining how Fluence came to be: “Our goal with Fluence is to make a transformative impact and fundamentally improve the way media is promoted across the web. We believe the best way to reach your full audience is to first connect directly to curators, domain experts, and other trusted sources who can give you feedback or recommend you to others. As more media is produced than ever before and everyone’s attention fragments limitlessly online, curators are increasingly essential in reaching the right people”.

While receiving more music than they can possibly listen to is certainly a gripe of many a music journalist, there do seem to be a few hurdles for Fluence to overcome before it achieves its goal. For one thing, unless there is mass adoption of the platform on the part of labels as well as self-releasing musicians, it’s just going to be another thing demanding a journalist’s attention, in addition to everything else. And potentially more time if gate-keepers are being paid to check out content and curators are therefore obliged to comment on it.

There may also be issues with journalists and other curators using the names of their employers to earn money in this way. And, arguably, it is already a music journalist / booker / A&R’s job to listen to new music, so is it ethical to then charge musicians to listen to their music above others? There’s also the issue that really good new music probably won’t need to pay to get attention, so a sizable part of those musicians who do pay are likely sharing less good (maybe because it’s not developed or finished) music. Which will become a turn off for curators.

These are all questions that will need to be answered, but Ranashinghe seems hopeful that Fluence can be used to benefit all involved, also saying in his blog post: “We believe that by improving the way media reaches its intended audience, it will help the creative economy reach its full potential. More people will engage with media that they are likely to enjoy and new fans will be reached who ultimately turn into paying customers”.

Here’s a video showing off the service:

And you can find the site itself here.



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