The 21st Century version of being the DJ at a house-party.

In the dark ages before the internet, people used to share music physically.  They’d do things like make mixtapes for eachother, or trade albums back and forth, telling all their friends about what bands they’ve discovered.  At house-partys, invariably one person would end up “DJ” for the night… hanging out by the CD player and picking songs to play for the room.

Then, as it always does, technology comes in and makes things more efficient, faster, and better, though that last one can be debatable at times.

So along came Napster, mp3 players, P2P, etc.  We all know that story.  And now there’s an influx of different web startups that allow people to share their music and their musical tastes with the online world in all sorts of different ways.

Enter Blip.fm.  It’s the new incarnation of being the DJ at the houseparty.  You get to be the one to tell all your friends what songs to check out, and provide a soundtrack to an everchanging mood, timeline, day, whatever.

Similar to Twitter, Blip allows people to create their own profile, then send small messages (like tweets) out to their “listeners” which are the other people on the network who have decided they want to follow you.  The addition that Blip adds to the Twitter/micro-blogging concept is that they have a streaming audio player built in, so you can attach a URL to your message that will trigger a song to start playing.  And as long as the song has an mp3 posted somewhere online, and that location has been input into the Blip.fm database, you can stream it to all your listeners. Its very easy to add a song to the Blip database, all you need to do is post the mp3 online somewhere, and input the URL on the Blip site.

So for bands, it’s another great way to be active in the online space.  Musicians, you should start blipping songs by your influences, and by bands whos fans might like your music.  Start listening to other blip DJs who are blipping songs by similar artists too.  What will happen is, you’ll build up a listener-base of avid music-fans who happen to like bands similar to yours.  Then, when you occasionally blip one of your own songs, and you’re open and honest about it, you’ll have a receptive community of listeners paying attention to you, and maybe they’ll like what they hear.