So you what to discover new music but don’t want to sift through hundreds of music related online diary entries or waste your time at myspace? Me neither, but that’s mostly because I despise the word “blog” and am not too fond of myspace. Well, there are a couple of sites out there that can give you recommendations based upon what type of music you like.
Pandora:
Based on the Musical Genome Project, you sign up for an account and enter the name of your favourite band. From there, the site develops a playlist featuring the artist plus its neighbours according to the MGP. You can interact with site, telling it what songs you like and don’t like and it will continually modify the playlist to ensure that it matches the music with your tastes. While it contains a great deal of music, there are still a number of bands/albums that they don’t have. Also, it’s restricted to streaming audio and who wants to listen to that continuously?
Last FM:
A Brittish site that not only recommends music but also tries to build an online community. For this site to recommend music to you, you download a plug-in for which ever application you use to play music on your computer. As you listen to a song, it will send the artist/track information to its database. Once you’ve listened to a minimum number of songs, you will start seeing recommendations based upon what you’ve listened to and what other people, who have listened to the same artists/songs, have listened to. They also categorize the recommendations based upon popularity, so you can choose how indie you want to be. Their database is extremely comprehensive and aside from music that I’ve recorded myself, everything that I’ve listened to has been in the database already.
However, there are some limitations. For the system to work properly, you need your mp3′s to be correctly tagged. If they’re not, they won’t match up properly and possibly won’t be recorded in their database. Which brings up another point. As well, a list of everything that you listen to will be stored and displayed on the Internet. This might make some people a little uncomfortable but they don’t expose any personal information, other than your username and what you’ve been spinning. If you want to see my list, click here.
This article has probably been more suited to the web section but we’ll just end it with some music talk just to appease the higher ups. A couple of quick recommendations, Jose Gonzalez’s album Veneer gets re-released in North America this week. Check out his cover of the song Heartbeats, if you haven’t already. Best cover I’ve heard in a long time.
Also, Peregrine by The Appleseed Cast is my early favourite for album of the year. While I tend to get a little fanboy-ish about the band, Peregrine is a fantastic album and should be heard by everyone.
