Web 2.0 Music Discovery Revisited Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Last year in school I did a small research project for my Music and the WWW class, on Music Discovery. It was a survey of the various web applications (like Pandora and Last.fm) and social networks (like MySpace) that were available at the time, and later an essay to give my insight and vision: http://rex.fm/musicdiscovery/

Now, one year later, it feels like all of these things are coming together. More and more sites are supporting "scrobbling" to Last.fm, allowing me to keep track of my listening habits across different websites and devices.

Here's what I'm using today:

1. thesixtyone - discovery, recommendations, player

2. Last.fm - discovery, recommendations, player, mobile

3. hypemachine - discovery, popular, player

4. Pandora - discovery, player, mobile *does not scrobble easily

Between these four applications, there seems to be enough variety and collaboration to keep me satisfied for a long time. TheSixtyOne is a service to keep an eye on... either their recommendation engine seems to be doing something special or the people who hang out there tend to like my kind of music.

When it comes to downloading music, I maintain that it's always best to borrow CDs from your friends. See you around the web ;-)