You Never Know Who’s Listening (Or, How I Got Interviewed by the BBC)

Music-lovers geek-out!

Turntable.fm is a site where you can spin your favorite tunes along with friends, old and new. It’s like a cross between Pandora and Facebook. You and up to 4 other people pick tunes to play and then can chat about them as they play. It’s a really cool integration of music sharing and social media, and I’m totally hooked!

Last night, I was in a room called Nextbop NuJazz, devoted to the type of new jazz music that is featured on the great website Nextbop.com. I was there with my good friends Dave Marriott, Donna, and Brad Gibson, along with some other folks we had just met. We were spinning tunes by artists like Aaron Parks, Charnet Moffett, Ambrose Akinmusire, Ben Allison and others and geeking out talking about the tunes.

One feature of the site is that you can click a Twitter button and tweet to all your followers that you are DJ’ing and tell them what you are playing. I did this, and a few minutes later I flipped over to my Twitter stream to see what was going on there and got his tweet:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/thedailylunge/statuses/90675253541474304″]

I was blown away! I replied and ended up chatting with Jessica about the piece they were going to do about the site and agreed to be interviewed about my experience with it. She asked me if I would stay up until 2:45am to be interviewed while DJ’ing in the room! Well, I couldn’t say no. I had only been on the site for a couple of days and all of a sudden I was being interviewed as an “expert”!

The interview was short and sweet, and the host talked more about his music than the music we were playing, but it’s still cool. Here’s audio, thanks to Dave:

Moral of the story: you never know where opportunity is going to come from. I was just minding my own business and having fun with my friends, but because I tweeted about it, I ended up on a broadcast that reaches 241 million people weekly(!) in 27 countries around the world.

Whoa.

This is the power of social media. I know lots of people who think of Twitter and Facebook as burdens, as being somehow “fake”, or as just plain stupid. But if you use these tools merely to enhance what you already do, in a way that is real and genuine, you can make connections that you never dreamed you’d be able to make. All I was doing was having fun, spinning records with my friends and checking out a new and interesting site. And it took me literally 10 seconds to tweet about it. In so doing, I got the attention of the BBC.

That was never my intended goal. But, you never know who’s listening…