We began Taped Together as an effort to share the holiday spirit with interesting people we know through music, but also as an experiment in the intersection of two seemingly opposite concepts-turned-buzzwords-of-2009: Crowdsourcing and content-curation. The tracks in this month-long playlist were crowdsourced via our wonderful contributors, but we curated “the crowd” by inviting people — creatives, writers, musicians, social entrepreneurs and other miscellaneous smart cookies — whose voices and thinking we already loved.
In that sense, Taped Together has been as much a music project as it has been a living example of a new, experimental model of content discovery - something you could call “meta-curation,” producing the controlled serendipity of sourcing from a hand-picked crowd.
As for Taped Together, it doesn’t have to end with the holiday season. We hope to one day extend it to other occasions and purposes — why not a meta-curated Taped Together running mix, or party playlist, or reading companion? We’ll be exploring all the fascinating possibilities in this tremendously exciting new decade. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, as promised, we’re making all 31 tracks available for download here.
~ Maria (@brainpicker) & Mel (@melex)
