I chose to look at the Ultimate Guitar website because, aswell as using it myself for finding tabs and chords for guitar, when having a browse around the rest of the site, I thought it would be an interesting site to analyse as there seems to be a sort of online music community within the site.
The site is structured quite simply, in terms of graphical and visual layout.
It has a navigation bar at the top centre of the site which stays there throughout each page of the website and the information on the screen is placed in the centre vertically as a default profile throughout the site with a black background theme (obviously seen more on either sides of the profile).
It is structured in clickable categories placed in the navigation bar. For example a user can click on ‘updates’ or ‘news’ and read about new and upcoming music events, concerts, happenings, ect; or ‘reviews’ and ‘interviews’ will give them lots of interesting reads of bands and artists who have recently come out, been in the news, or released some new material. There is also an interesting category titled ‘lessons’ where users can read articles designed to teach guitar and help writers with inspiration.
The main part and usage of the site, perhaps, is the search bar situated in the centre of the page (when it hasn’t been scrolled down or moved in any way), where users, like myself, can type a band name or a song and will be listed with a certain amount of tabs for it that the site has available.
Music has a huge cultural appeal today and this site is all about that. It bring its users news and music examples and information and has built its own network where regular users have singed up to the site, have their own profiles, share music, info and tabs and can even chat together using the forum.
So culturally, the site is based on already existing music, but also, the fact that it offers users tabs and chords for music so they can learn how to play it for themselves makes it even richer in a creative and ‘individualised’ culture where users are encouraged to create and emphasise their musical identities.
This links back to the Blanchard reading and the area I focused my reading on about ‘lurkers’ because technically, in this case, I would be a so-called lurker as I use the search bar to find chords and occasionally will have a quick read at the interview section to see if there is anything interesting on any bands or artists I like. However I am not a member of the site, so I don’t use the forums, comments and picture applications or use the profile settings to look at and communicate with other members. So ‘Is there something special about those who choose to comment and those who do not?’ (Blanchard, 2004) Well in this case, yes. Because it is the number of ‘lurkers’ who visit the site for reading or tab searching that make the site what it is because without this huge cultural fan-based following, the site would never have been as popular, well-known and so used!
Anita Blanchard (2004) ‘Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community’ online at: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogs_as_virtual.html
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