Music discovery tools worth discovering
Appalled at the paucity of Ping? Here are a few online music discovery sources which don’t suck.
- Ghostly Discovery – frankly awesome iPhone app which helps you discover new music based on your mood, the sort of tempo you want and a sliding scale from organic to electronic.
- Last fm – You’ve heard of this one, right? It’s my streaming music radio station of choice because of its fantastically reliable recommendations based on your listening habits (scrobbles), friends, neighbours, or single artists you like. See also Pandora ( no longer available in the UK) blip.fm and Spotify. (I’m ‘neilojwilliams’ on lastfm, blip and spotify if you want to connect – but much more active on lastfm than the other two).
- Taste Kid – Website and iPhone app which learns your tastes based on the artists (and films, books, shows) you tell it you like, and spits out extremely good recommendations of other stuff to try.
- The perfect five – weekly blog of 5 great hand-picked tunes, all free to download.
- 14 tracks – weekly selection of stand-out tracks from the knowledgeable folks at Boomkat
- 22 tracks - free streaming jukebox with 22 playlists across 22 genres, updated weekly by various DJs, music journalists, radio personalities and other new music obsessives. If only it had an RSS feed.
- Apple’s Genius - mostly I use this for making playlists from my existing collection but (very) occasionally it also recommends other stuff in the iTunes store worth checking out.
- Ministry of Sound dance radio – iPhone app which helps you find every dance radio station under the sun.
- Juno recommendations and podcasts – dance music download site offering unparallelled podcasts and recommendations. Search iTunes for ‘Juno’ to see what’s on offer. See also Hospital.
So how about you? What tools do you use to discover music and why?
Photo credit: DRB62
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Comments
My favourite hasn’t existed for years… Audiogalaxy was insanely brilliant, though probably broke every law around and required lax personal IT security. I’d go to work leaving the computer running, then come home to find a pile of songs recommended by online ‘friends’. Much of it was dross that was instantly deleted, but there was loads of good stuff, that inevitably I bought, investigated further, bought more…
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/the-greatest-defunct-web-sites-and-dotcom-disasters-49296926/9/
These days, tends to be a mixture of blogs, forums and Hypem. Altogether less satisfactory.
Simon
It’s no longer available, but I think MoodLogic’s Magnet Browser was pretty cool. Although, as one of its designers, I’m not unbiased. 
You can read more about it here:
http://www.inventinginteractive.com/2010/09/22/moodlogic-magnet-browser/
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Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
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