Three Social Music Discovery Services
A short side-by-side of three wonderful ways to discover new music. Because everybody could stand to find some new music that is truly interesting rather than the mass-marketed utterly forgettable crap you get in the top 40 lists worldwide. I will look at Pandora, Last.fm and MusicMobs. If you know other such services, drop us a comment!
My current favorite music finding site, Last.fm is first on the list. The sites offers plugins for most popular music players, you install the plugin and enter your last.fm account information and then play your music as usual. Last.fm will collect all the songs you play, leading to pretty charts and XML feeds, and recommendations for new music, suggested forum and journal reads (as the last.fm site incorporates those, too), and people with similar musical tastes.
It is a very extensive site, with lots of user-generated tagging goodness, active forums, and what to think of this lovely 'album chart' made simply by playing my music? Discovering all the features of last.fm will take you a while, but once you have the plugin installed all you have to do is just play the music, the rest is optional but fun. Last.fm accounts are free, but if you just want to check out the recommendations without signing up try the 'Explore' page.
Musicmobs is Win and Mac iTunes only. It's unique selling point (well, it's free but you catch my drift) is that after installing the MusicMobs client (which works closely together with iTunes) is that not only does it upload your playcount in a similar fashion to last.fm, you can share playlists with other people, and vice versa.
And playlist sharing is more fun than I thought. If you have the client installed, all you have to do is click the play button on, say, my 'favorite soft electronica' playlist, or perhaps my 'favorite soft acoustica' playlist' and it will import that playlist into iTunes (well, the artists+songs you already HAVE in your library, obviously) for you to enjoy. It's the same sensation you get when a friend comes over and plays some of your CDs; maybe not the music you would have picked but then again, you already know those songs so well. It can be refreshing. And publishing a playlist is dead easy; fire up the Mobster client, click 'publish playlist', optionally add some tags and comments, and off you go.
Pandora which I think is also the newest of the three and in many ways the easiest to use, but possibly also the most limited. All you do is enter an artist you find interesting (for testing purposes, and because I like listening to them, I put in Arcade Fire). It will then directly start streaming music to you in the browser, and pick songs/artists that match the one you chose according to the information in their 'Music Genome Project'. While I'm a little fuzzy on how that works, the resulting picks seem reasonable and the 'why is this playing' button yields some interesting results with a full-text rationalisation of why exactly the currently playing song was picked:
Not bad. The drawbacks (for me): I have to listen to the music in a browser as opposed to playing it in my favorite music app. I'm also curious to see if the streaming will keep working OK as this service becomes more popular. Time will tell. Also: you only get 20 minutes of 'preview' before you have to register. Registering will only work in the US at the moment (the site cites different streaming regulations in different parts of the world as the cause of this), and ultimately there will be two versions: ad-supported or for-pay (at around 36$/year).
If you do sign up or use one of these services, drop me a line, it's always fun to make new music contacts. And if you're a weirdo like me, you might enjoy this little MusicMobs playlist: 'Beautiful Freak'.
Tagged music, audio, last.fm, musicmobs, pandora, socialsoftware, streaming
8 reacties:
Having started as a pandora user, and moved to the grey zone between pandora and last.fm at your behest there's still room in my life for both of them. Because I'm a new user at last.fm it will take a while to rise above the noise-floor of my still statistically-lacking account. For example, a single listen to the Magnetic Field's 69 Love Songs will result (currently) in a place at the top of all my lists due to the sheer number of songs involved in that particular work - and I tend to listen to whole albums. All that will of course change as I use the system for an increasingly lengthy period of time. So while acurate results can't yet be calculated based on my still-small data set, I'm not worried as the sampling of data and user tastes will continue to grow on the site globally as well as in my own case - making for exciting possibilities.
Also my worries about the plugin were overstated once I realised that the same people that make my player helped to develop the plugin.
All this to say last.fm does, well, rock, and hopefully I'll get some new discoveries out of it.
I always wanted to behest someone. No, wait, that was behead. nevermind.
'tis true, last.fm does get more useful the longer you use it.
As for Pandora, I still don't quite get it. It's 20 hours free and then you have to register? But the ad-supported version isn't quite ready yet? And what's with this US-only stuff, I thought you were living in Canada?
Questions, questions. One last one: what IS your music player of choice?
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Windows: Foobar2000
Linux: mpg321 or mplayer - although to be honest my Linux boxes are back to being console-only and on machines with no sound cards. Also I have a lot of Monkey's Audio files for which there is no linux, or OS X decoder as of yet. To further drag out the saga, I only recently got my actual sound cards (the ones I use for multi-track audio recording and mixing) working under linux and I'm still a Logic Audio user. Although, if you're interested, the Ardour and jack projects are poised to take on the music production world.
As for Pandora: I didn't know about the 20 hour limit, although I did "register." It takes only a name and an e-mail address, and no cash - surely about the same as last.fm - although the more I use last.fm the more I appreciate being able to wander through a comunity whereas Pandora does seem very isolationist and well, loner-like since I'm only interacting with some set of abstract musical concepts and can't directly "contribute" to the exprience of other Pandora users short of sharing a "station."
Being in Canada seemingly falls under the "US" clause - and for all intents and purposes we're just the soft-spoken soon-to-be US posetion. The ad supported version isn't that awful either, I mean with Adblock and Flashblock I'm all set.
Petros, you mean of all the three people reading this blog you are actually the only one (cept for me) to use Amarok, THE kickass linux player (WITH last.fm integration built-in) and you don't?
For shame! Get that X server running mister! :P
As an aside, you can use APE (that's the monkey extension isn't it?) under linux, I have a couple of plugins for gmstreamer, and I know it works under mplayer. There's bound to be plugins for other players, too.
Also: I'm not an audiophile, so I keep everything in 192k MP3 which works for my ears and still has the greatest compatibility with all manner of devices or I would've converted everything to ogg long ago.
Thanks for the APE hint! I will definitely have to check it out. I had no idea linux codecs existed. The APE FAQ still says, erroneously, that there are no linux or os x components so, well, my bad.
I'm actually no audiophile either. It's too expensive and time consuming - what with all the arguing about the quality and gauge of speaker cables etc. I'm only a little anal about sound because of my musical upbringing, as limited and short lived as it was.
My own reasoning for a few files of lossless audio is that I like to have some of my favorites on my, ahem, 6230 ;) , to play in the car while I'm driving. I can fit a lot more decent-quality AAC files on the phone's memory card that I can the "alt-preset standard" VBR mp3s that makeup most of my collection. By keeping them as lossless I can just make AAC files, or mp3s depending on my needs-although once I get a bigger memory card for whatever music player I'm using at the moment, I will move back to mp3s full time. Ok, so maybe I'm a little picky... but we gotta have hobbies right? I can just see the wife-to-be rolling her eyes.
By the way, what do you use as a portable music player? And are there any that work with last.fm scobblers to allow submission of tracks that were played while mobile?
I'm one of those ipod jerks. 40 Gb gen 3.
AFAIK there's no way to update your last.fm playcount with mobile play data (please prove me wrong, its very annoying) but I'm looking forward to Amarok 1.4 (its in beta-2 now), the changelog says:
"Optionally update playcount for items played on iPod and submit them to last.fm and synchronize ratings between amaroK and iPod."
This is also fun:
"Tracks can now be rated from 1-5 stars manually, in addition to the score which amaroK calculates automatically based on your listening habits. You can use the 'Rating' column and Win+1..5 to change the rating."
your wish is my command.
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