Media Service Idea - Struggles part.....well, there's been way too many of these already

Just when I was about to get my thoughts clarified, I found an existing media service that would overlap my idea heavily. Not entirely, but the core idea is exactly the same that I had in my mind. Please check, www.kompoz.com.

A positive sight to this is that the idea is actually working. There are some quality musicians collaborating with each other, composing, discussing, creating some nice pieces of music…And the finished projects aren’t all that bad either. I’ll congratulate myself for the idea that I had, which actually would work, but at the same time I’ll dump it and stomp on it.

I thought that a collaborative media service would have been the niche looked for, but it obviously wasn’t. How to move on? I’ve been thinking to forget brainstorming the form or concept of the final service. Instead, I will be researching the phenomena in hand. The research will be the journey that will lead me to the eventual media service.

What’s the phenomenon then? It has something to do with the motivation to share and participate online. Which especially fascinates me is the sharing of creative work that users do online. Why people want to share their creations, show their talent and participate in collaborations? I haven’t conducted almost any research at all yet, but my intuition says that there is some kind of underlying need to express oneself and eventually be acknowledged for that. This doesn’t have anything to do with the absolute skills or talent. No matter how good or bad one is, the need to show off one’s talent is strong. Actually, it seems that the more shaky and unsure one is with the talent, the stronger the need. At this stage, this multi-talented guy is enough of a proof. Previously the step to show one’s talent has been extremely high. It’s a big step to take the guitar and attend the open-mic session at the local bar. It’s way easier, and actually quite anonymous too, to record some finger picking in own bedroom and post the video online. 

I have been thinking about the reasons why creativity is such a big factor in online posting. Here are my thoughts of the needs in couple of bullet points:

• -          to express oneself
• -          to feel unique
• -          to get attention
• -          to be acknowledged for the skills
• -          to find people with similar interests
• -          to make use of the talent

 These points are quite broad and need to be specified. Maybe these reasons might even be disproved after some researching is done. Actually I wish that those will be disproven and more interesting points would be risen. I’ll do some lurking, send some questionnaires to the users of some communities and so on. I’ll let the research to guide itself for now.