Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Whatevs Open Inquiry: What Kind of Music Sites Y'all Use?
Posted by D Patrick Rodgers on Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 1:24 PM
As much time as I spend on this here music blog and others, I still haven't been able to pin down just what sort of musical Internetz wizardry most serious listeners tend to use, if any.
Though it's clearly slowly going the way of the floppy disk, MySpace is a relatively useful resource for tracking down bands, digging up general info and even sampling a few tunes--all be they of "straight shitty" quality, as a friend of mine often says. They recently changed up the look of the player, but that's one of the most transparent cases of turd-polishing I've seen in a while. Just because you have a visualizer doesn't mean the track doesn't sound godawful. This dude over at Mashable pretty much nailed why it is that MySpace Music is so weak.
Personally, I'm a Last.fm man. The UK-based site (similar to Pandora) hosts audio tracks, and bands frequently offer various singles or B-sides of near-album quality. Last.fm is nerd-oriented enough that it seems to scare off the folks who might pollute its various charts and graphs with the likes of (dare I say it?) Nickelback and so forth, and the site makes recommendations and constructs a "radio station" of artists you're likely to enjoy. Its recommendations tend to be pretty satisfactory, though I don't know a damn thing about all these algorithms sites such as these employ. I'm sure Michael Eades could explain it to me if I asked nicely. When he gets back from SXSW.
So what's the score? Is Pandora the best Internet radio/recommendation service? Some people like iTunes' Genius, though I've had my issues. Virb? PureVolume? Mufin? Do you just say "to hell with it" and go down to the record store? Tell me what's good. I want to know.
Comments (15)
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Pandora. It never has a problem with my computer running a kah-billion programs at the same time. Set up a bunch of stations based on a wide variety of your favorite artists/songs, then "Quick Mix," that's where it's at.
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Sometimes I go through lastfm and search for an artist, then just listen to their station with similar artists...it works well for some, but if you search How I Became the Bomb, the bulk of the similar acts are all spanish bands for some reason..
www.hypem.com or www.elbo.ws are really good aggregators that compile everything from various blogs and allow you search or stream tracks.
I use Hype Machine and elbo.ws from time to time; they're good ways of digging up tracks or seeing if any local artists have had mp3s posted on blogs & such recently. Could be that I'm totally self-indulgent and like that Last.fm "scrobbles" my plays, letting the world know which bitchin' tunes I'm checking out at any given time.
And @Jenny: I know the Bomb has played in Spain a time or two and they likely have an anomalous fan base there, so it probably associates them with other bands these Spaniards listen to. That's one issue with Last.fm: "related artists" for very small or local bands will usually just be other local bands, even if they're dissimilar.
I really like Last.fm... because they do a pretty good job of creating "sounds like...." playlists.
You gotta love Last.fm. But it only works right if your mp3s are tagged the way they want them to be tagged, and it seems like they are ignoring some artists (No Album results found for Neko Case - Middle Cyclone....WTF?)
Not really a place to hear new music but popmatters.com is usually at least a good read. Or just email Dr. Dougan at MTSU.
I like Last.fm quite a bit, but I've never used any of the others. What I really like about it, though, are all the ways you can get recommendations. You can take the recommendations that they give you, or you can find band-to-band similars, or you can go to the page of someone who listens to one of your favorite bands and see what else they're listening to, or you can search through the tags, some of which are very specific and helpful. There's just a lot of options that can yield wildly different results.
Last.fm works on a number of factors though I think, mainly, it's a simple cross referencing and assumption that if you like X band and everyone else that listens to that band likes Y band, it's safe to assume you will also like Y band. Couple that with the I Love / Hate This buttons and you've got a pretty decent system for making recommendations.
Pandora, I believe, is much more scientific in its approach and actually analyzes the music and makes suggestions based on genre coupling and spectrum analysis.
You've read about the big Netflix challenge to improve their recommendation engine by 10%, right? The winning team gets a million dollars (netflixprize.com) I believe. So many of these online engines are banking on being able to predict your taste but there's nothing better than just trying something new out!
More and more I use just Lala.com to listen to my collection and sample songs. It's browser-based, there are no ads and it doesn't have the social networking aspects I find annoying about some other sites.
But it won't upload large files, like the DJ mixes I find through elbo.ws.
Other than that, I'm all over the place...bands' MySpace pages, RCRD LBL, blogs, artist web pages.
Playlist.com is good only in theory, at this point. Mufin is terrible. No experience with Slacker. No desire to have Pandora play music for me -- I'll find it myself. Human recommendations are still far better than code-generated ones.
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