Dilettante Music: Another Classical Music Social Networking Site

A few weeks ago I mentioned Klassikal Musik, a social networking site for classical musicians. Well, they're not alone--Dilettante Music has also recently launched. What is Dilettante?

an online classical music community that harnesses innovative and powerful technology to connect users with music, and with each other:

• Musicians can find the audience they need and the friends, fans and colleagues who support them.
• Music lovers can find the music they want with a powerful and intuitive classical music search engine, supported by the most comprehensive data set available.
• The curious can explore and discover new talent.
• The newcomer can step gingerly into an otherwise daunting world with all the help they need.

Some of the features I've noticed are friending features (a la Facebook), user-created blogs, music listings (including a user's full bio, repertoire, favorites, instruments, skills, recordings, and influences), messaging, as well as downloads, which seem to be the monetization model for the site.

I've just joined this evening and it looks very slick indeed. One of the big differences from Klassikal Musik seems to be that new users are signing up with their real names, which points towards a networking model closer to what classical musicians are already doing with Facebook (event listings, groups, etc.). Unlike Klassikal Musik, which allows you to show either an alias or first name either full or partial name (or first name only to non-members), it doesn't look like Dilettante allows you to have an option on whether or not to display your full name on the members' directory visible to outsiders. The new users list shows that a fair number of English musicians are currently signing up en masse. In fact, I just sent out friend requests to a couple of Brit violinists I recently played concerts with.

Will Dilettante become the LinkedIn of classical music? Only time will tell, with more features slated to be rolled out in the near future.

(Thanks, Marta!)