Musicovery

These online services let you discover music like never before

by MALIN GURUNG

FROM ISSUE # 162 (June 2009) | IN THIS ISSUE
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Ever felt the rewarding pleasure of discovering that new song which you simply cannot live without now? Listening to music is an ongoing process, in the course of which, you discover new styles, new genres and sometimes, even a new you. But finding the hidden gems in the seemingly endless library of songs and albums is a hard task. Social music recommendation services can help you in just that. Just like the social networking sites, social music sites put the user in the forefront. These sites create a detailed profile of the users and their music taste and recommend new music based on their taste. Here are some of the most popular music recommendation services today.

Last.fm (www.last.fm)
Boasting a user base of over 30 million users spread across some 200 countries, Last.fm is arguably the most popular music recommendation service. What sets Last.fm apart from similar services is that it syncs your profile with your iTunes library, iPods, and other music players and softwares, so that your profile reflects your actual music library.

Last.fm also offers some social networking facilities. You can add friends with similar taste, leave them shouts, form and join groups and write journals, RSVP to events and many more. But there is a catch; Last.fm is a paid service for users other than that of US, UK and Germany. Users elsewhere can use all the services, except for streaming live music. For full-length track streaming, a paid subscription is required.

Imeem (www.imeem.com)
Imeem retains almost all the features of Last.fm and the best part is, it's free. Unlike Last.fm, imeem lets the users to stream full-length tracks for free. It also lets you upload your library to their server, so that you can listen to them remotely. Uploading the first 100 tracks are free, others requires a paid subscription. Imeem does a pretty good job on recommending new music. There are actually quite good amount of Nepali artists on the site and you can stream all of them for free.

Imeem also has some limited social networking abilities. It lets users interact by sharing videos, photos and blogs.

Musicovery (www.musicovery.com)
Musicovery is a fun way to discover new songs. Rather than learning your music taste and recommending you new music accordingly, Musicovery lets you choose music according to your mood, the genre and the decade from which the music was released. After all the parameters are set, it shows a visual representation of the songs in an animated way. Musicovery is an interactive and a fun-filled way to discover music.

MyStrands (www.mystrands.com)
A community based music recommendation service, MyStrands is similar to Last fm and imeem. What makes MyStrands standout is that it's available on numerous mobile devices and platforms.