Joel recently wrote a very succinct blog post detailing some of the issues that all of the disparate music sites are currently experiencing.
I would like to organize all of the followers of the various music proposals and promote a discussion on how we would be able to unify all of our efforts. We have a chat room already set up here.
Feel free to e-mail me: attila@stackoverflow.com
The Internet needs a site that is devoted to the practicing musician — let's make it happen!
Joel pretty well sums up my thoughts in his post:
- Almost all X questions are on-topic for site Y
- If Y already exists, it already has a tag for X, and nobody is complaining
- You’re not creating such a big group that you don’t have enough experts to answer all possible questions
- There’s a high probability that users of site Y would enjoy seeing the occasional question about X
I think it will always be better to start with a more encompassing site to start with, and that doesn't just go for this specific merge proposal.
A bigger community is better for overall site traffic, which means more questions, more answers, more good answers, more community interaction, etc., etc. I don't think all the benefits of high site traffic need to be fully enumerated here, but I will point out something important -- when a revenue model is developed for the network, it's always going to be easier to make it work with a huge amount of traffic. Law of large numbers and all that.
It will always be easier to separate out specific topics from a community than to combine them into a community later on (both non-technically, and, presumably, technically as well).
The effect of #1 above cannot be understated. One of the things I dislike about the per-site Metas is that identical topics are fragmented throughout the network. For example, say there's an obvious bug on the user account page. Each per-site Meta will get its own set of questions asked about the same thing, yet those types of posts all belong on Meta SO. The point is that the potential for identical on-topic questions across multiple sites should be avoided. The idea is to have repositories of knowledge on each site, without having the knowledge fragmented across the network.
The more general the site, the easier it is to come up with a meaningful and recognizable name/image set (i.e., branding) for the site. This ties into my point about revenue model, certainly.
Subtopics can easily be segregated by using the tag system. This is key, as it allows for sharing of knowledge between the sub-communities. For example, if I'm a guitar player and I have a music theory question, with a mega-site (for lack of a better word), the best answer may come from someone who plays the trumpet. With a separate community, my question would be isolated to that community. (I would still probably get a very good answer to that specific question, but the more obscure the question is, the wider the audience you want to see it to be able to get an answer -- sometimes any answer.) Also, as Joel said in #4 above, tags allow people to see on-topic questions from the perspective of other people. Using the same example as before, I might browse the [music-theory] tag, and be able to pick something up or have my question answered by a question also tagged [trumpet], but not [guitar].
I'm not really a musician any more, and won't likely contribute to any music sites. However, I do want to offer my opinion.
I think SE communities should be built around a common community as well as a common topic. Music is a topic, but it comprises some very different communities. For starters, there are musicians vs music listeners. I think we're already narrowed down to musicians, so that's a good start.
But what about genre? Pop, Rock, Jazz, Classical, marching band, etc... These are VERY different communities. Will a serious classical musician want to participate in a site where "How do I clean up a noisy Crybaby Wah Wah pedal" is a typical question? Will a rock guitarist want to participate if the first question he sees is about controlling your breathing while marching with a Sousaphone?
You have to consider, too, that not all of the proposed music sites are really exclusively for music when you look closely. For example, a question about setting up a home studio for spoken word recording should get completely different answers from those to a question about setting a home studio for music recording. Both are audio related and would fit in the audio production/engineering site, but only one is music. I doubt the voice acting or foley art communities are large enough to support their own niche sites. It would be beneficial to expand music to sound. Perhaps something like "Sound: Production, Practice, and Promotion" would be a sufficient catch all. Then we can just let the tags work the subdivision.
