There seems to be a missing link between music recommendation and social sites. I want a site (and have started an experiment using Drupal) that is like a delicious or twitter for aggregating new songs from friends. It’s a very simple idea - you hear about new music from friends and those songs might have nothing to do with what you’ve been listening to or buying (a la last.fm, pandora, amazon recommendations). I don’t want chat or photo sharing thrown in. I’ve been told that MOG might be what I’m looking for, but after tooling around the site I’m not convinced. It’s too visually cluttered. I really just want a list of new songs and an optional description. None of the social music sites listed in this overview at TechCrunch are what I’m thinking about.
I’ve been talking with a friend, Farsheed Hamidi-Toosi, about this and just noticed another friend, Dave Segal, has made a nice clean site, Migrating Taste, where he writes about songs and links to music from his imeem account. I’m curious how popular imeem hosting can get before RIAA threats shut them down.
Here is some news about SNOCAP making a deal with imeem:
Imeem allows it’s customers to build and stream playlists. Using SNOCAP, imeem can make an offer to all of the artists in the SNOCAP registry. In this case the offer was, “let me stream your song in a user generated playlist and I’ll share some percentage of my advertising revenue with you”. Artists can opt in or out of the offer depending on how badly they want the promotion and/or the money.
So I guess imeem is setting this up preemptively for when/if people start caring about the protected songs on their site.
Thanks for the quote.
iLike.com has a feature where you can use RSS to subscribe to your friend’s most recently played tracks. Granted you have to sign up with iLike and your friend has to be on iLike, but it sounds like it may come close to the functionality you want.
Ethan (from Getcha.info)
Nice blog there Ethan. Songbird on open API looks really good for the reasons you’ve listed. I bet the functionality i want will come eventually.
I will have to check out iLike. One thing that I’ve added on my lil’ private site that is a little different is that people take the time to think about their favorite new track (as opposed to just the most recently played from itunes) - and usually people write a little about how they found the band, some story about seeing them or why they like them. It adds a lot.
It seems like the problems with creating interesting music sharing sites are legal, not technology or design. That sucks a lot.