The Hippodrome

Worse than the fact that so many music networking and distribution sites limit the amount of material you can upload is the fact they seclude the musician in a music-only environment. Self Portrait, still in beta form despite its launch last year, does its part to unite photographers, filmmakers, writers, visual and performance artists, computer artists, fashion designers, architects, and yes, even musicians. If managed correctly, this conglomeration could mean the most exciting artistic social networking site yet to hit the interweb.

While co-creator Theo Wenner may not be the most popular dude in the art world (see the Gawker article for more details), the site is a solid resource for anyone looking to network with enterprising artists of any medium. Self Portrait stands out not only in its variety of media, but also in the quality of its content. Unlike creep-spacers, the small number of artists that already know about the site have some pretty solid stuff up. It’s nice to see a site where people seem to care more about their work then their friend count. It’s even nicer to see a place where the majority or artists are unsigned. (I won’t disclose who, but we’ve already found a few upcoming features here!)

The mechanics of Self Portrait are not parsimonious, but rather a partly good/partly bad barrier against the impatient clientele that saturate neighboring giants like MySpace and Purevolume. There are lots of fun (and time consuming) details to fill out, as well as friends, networks, playlists, and events to sort through. It’s hard to tell how Self Portrait’s infrastructure would withstand a huge influx of users, since the site is relatively clean now, but like any growing network, will inevitably need new forms of policing in the future.

As far as actually selling goes, the visual art ranges from average in price to highway robbery. Music is either sold or not for download. Both these distribution techniques are dubious since it seems unlikely that much of anything is getting sold on the site. But despite the lack of financial possibility, the fact that so many different interests find a home under one domain name is a great start in uniting like minded creators who had, until now, been unfairly separated on the electronic market. This all demonstrates one of the most overlooked and invaluable lessons an aspiring artist of any medium can learn. You’re not alone.

This entry was posted by Ben Bernstein on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Site Reviews, Written By Ben Bernstein. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.