iVideosongs interests me on a couple or three levels. One is musical: the site offers a series of downloadable music lessons, primarily for guitar, based on chords and riffs from songs like Santana’s Smooth and the Indigo Girl’s Hammer and A Nail.
Another is that, aside from some basic lessons, they’ve found a way to make money. If the instruction comes from one of the “staff” teachers, the cost is a reasonable $4.95 a song. If you want some like Graham Nash teaching you how to play Teach Your Children on guitar or Our House on piano, you pay $9.95.
The third interesting thing here is that it’s another case of how education and training can be delivered, outside of the more traditional music school or music lesson framework.
Which leaves me wondering if the developing need for multimedia skills for working journalists might present an opportunity for some of the teachers out there to not just train but to make a few bucks out of it. So far, people such as Mindy McAdams, Andy Dickinson, Chuck Fadely (through the Yahoo newspaper video group) and others have been incredibly generous in sharing their knowledge with anyone with an internet link. For that matter, sharing knowledge is a lot of what’s behind the new, and rapidly growing, Wired Journalists.
But I suspect that despite all that sharing, there’s still room for some talented trainers to build, and charge for, lessons targeted at working journalists.
TAGS: EDUCATION, MULTIMEDIA, MUSIC, TRAINING
Thanks for the mention Mark.
Hammer and a nail – I love that song.