The Island

Soulseekers guide to community

I added an old friend on Facebook yesterday. We’ve met a long time ago and lost connection since. She is like the majority of my current friends — a product of the first generation growing up with the internets. I’ve began noticing this recently, that most of the people I know I’ve met on IRC, messageboards or Soulseek.

For those who missed Soulseek, it was a p2p network with an app that allowed searching through other people’s music libraries while other people could search through yours. It had chatrooms, private messages, very limited profiles and all kinds of neat settings. I’m not really sure how I stopped using it but I remember the software being increasingly buggy back then.

I met Linda on Soulseek as she was downloading a metalcore band called Undying from me. The bandwidth was bad so she asked if I could do anything about it. We started talking and realized we had both just seen this band play live. I saw it in Slovenia, she saw it in Switzerland. We loved a lot of similar music and we were both young, angry and most importantly: online. We became good friends. Linda wasn’t the only friend I made on Soulseek as it was set up in a way that it encouraged discovery of new music, serendipity and just general social interaction — and this was 2006.

These days I struggle. The only new music I find is pushed towards me on blogs I struggle to follow. I get recommendations from friends but I struggle to find and get the music. We even tried having a Google+ Community where we’d paste links to interesting releases but that died off soon. Some people use Spotify, but it’s not really available here yet.

So while we were reminiscing with Linda I wondered if Soulseek was still alive. Oh yeah. The Mac app works great, the chatrooms are not as full as they used to be. People started downloading music from me immediately. I even found three people sharing my old band’s music!

This makes me wonder about how much you really need to make a good product.

Soulseek seems to be made by one person, it has a crappy, confusing UI and is funded entirely by donations. Yet it fostered so many amazing relationships and moments of happiness that I find it very valuable.

On the other hand, Spotify is probably made by hundreds of people, is venture funded, makes money from ads and paid subscritpions. Bands don’t earn a lot of money from it. I also doubt it made any new connections between people, maybe only tightened the ones already made.

So, 7 years later, same crappy UI and all the old technologies still work well enough to let me go about my music discovery and new relationships.

Have we not developed at all or has was Soulseek so goddamn advanced back then?