My Top 5 Music Discovery Websites
One great advantage of the social web has been that it allows us to connect to people who enjoy music that's similar to what we enjoy - people we know and people we don't know. There's so many genres of music, so many timelines within those genres, so many convergences and divergences, so many countries, so many influences across these vectors, and thus so many variations. It often seems infinite but still it brings me an immense amount of joy to discover and listen. So I share with you the websites that I find indispensable now... use them well... Last.FM - A veteran website, perhaps the first, in social music websites. Here's how it works... I run a little program from Last.FM on all of my computers called an audioscrobbler. This program is notified when I listen to a song. It then notifies the Last.FM website of the time/date and artist/song that I'm listening to. The Last.FM app also picks up this information from my iPhone and my iPod Shuffle when I dock them. So in essence - Last.FM keeps an ongoing historical listening log of songs, albums, and artists that you listen to. Along the way, it does quite a few things. When someone visits my profile, they can listen to my "Radio Station" - a list of songs that I've "Loved" or I listen to frequently. It also lets me know who my neighbors are - users with similar tastes - and allows the user to add them as friends and/or listen to their radio stations. Of course, you can also type in the name of any user, artist, album and navigate to that profile page to discover more music. (My Profile: http://www.last.fm/user/narula) Pandora - a commercial venture that emerged from the Music Genome Project which began in 2000 Blip.FM Grooveshark Lala
