The Antidote to Mass Media

Are the kinds of tastes that make ketchup and Parade magazine wildly popular as mystifying to you as they are to us? Does it bother you that of all the talented people out there creating music and writing and whatnot, the only ones most people will ever hear of are a tiny subset reflecting these mass tastes?

Welcome to a different approach to discovering and presenting creative content.

Pinpointer enables you to finally discover the kind of content that you knew had to be out there on the Web. It's powered by people putting their reputations on the line to recommend things they believe other people will enjoy.

Why not use Facebook or other social media?

Facebook is a great way to push information out to your friends about things you like. We work in tandem with them for just that reason, but...

Once your Facebook "likes" have been broadcast, they're not very easy to look up after the fact. Even if people manage to find them, they tend not to be organized along the lines of what people might later be looking for.

On Facebook, you can't directly tell anybody outside your own immediate circle of friends about the good stuff you've found.

How Pinpointer is different

Pinpointer presents your recommendations in ways that are easier for people to use when they're actually looking for things.

Your recommendations can also reach more people than just your immediate circle of friends. For example, if you've got the proverbial "golden ear" for good music, more people are going to recognize it and consult your recommendations.

They don't have to be your Facebook friends.

They don't have to see your wall.

Not only will more people be able to benefit from your recommendations, you'll also be able to benefit from theirs. For example, without having to know them personally, you might check out the music recommendations of a savvy record store clerk...someone who books bands for a club...or a music critic for a national magazine.

You also won't have to spend a long time getting to know people before you get a sense of whose recommendations are worth consulting. The names of the people whose recommendations Pinpointer users have enjoyed the most always appear first in our recommender lists.

Getting Into Music

Music will likely be the first major area where we can start paying our recommenders, based on generating revenues of our own. We've had major online music sites express interest in working with Pinpointer, but we feel we'd be better matched with one or more sites that focus specifically on independent music—i.e., the kind the doesn't come from traditional major record labels, and isn't already heard everywhere on the radio.
In this kind of arrangement, we could pay our recommenders a much more attractive rate, and even more important, ensure that the recording artists themselves get the lion's share of the proceeds (instead of almost nothing, as they do under current arrangements with the major record labels).
While we're waiting for this type of partnership to emerge, we can also direct users to independent recording artists' own sites, if they provide a way for users to hear and buy their music.
The only type of relationship that's completely out of the question is one that involves illegal downloads. Our mission is to enable independent producers of content to succeed—not to exploit them, and not to assist anyone else in exploiting them.

The Antidote to Mass Media

Getting Into Music

How to Use It