Overview: music recommendation services
The number of websites promising to be able to recommend new music to users based upon their current listening habits is proliferating. This overview is intended to provide a quick guide. If you’re aware of any more or have comments on any of the ones listed below, please do let me know. Thanks.
Finetune
Goombah
iLike
Imeem
Last.fm
Mog
MusicMap
Music-Map
Musicovery
Pandora
Seeqpod
The Filter
Finetune
Pick any artist, we’ll build you a custom playlist featuring music by your artist and related artists.
That appears to be the long and short of it. I signed up for an account (no email verification required) and began to compile my playlist. This is the first and apparently main action to undertake on Finetune: search for an artist via name, tag, playlist or other criteria, click the ‘+’ sign beside up to three of the tracks that are returned and you’re on your way to building up the 45 song playlist required by the site. If you run out of inspiration too soon, Finetune will come up with some suggestions. You can then either listen to your playlist or an artist radio. The experience requires a little more user input than Last.fm or Mog, but in other ways is more instantaneous.
The artist playlist for Kraftwerk seemed pretty good, providing a sequence of the group’s Pocket Calculator followed by Faust, Stereolab and To Rococo Rot for starters (although the following track, Deuter’s Wind and Mountain was horribly new age-y). Annoyingly, the first playlist I flicked through for Madonna used up my ability to continue to forward through tracks. When I tried to see what was next, a message informed me ‘you’re gonna have to listen to some of them…’ - the only way to dismiss this is to click the ‘whatever’ button thus propelling me into a weird father/teenage son interaction with a bit of moody software… Finetune clearly recognise this as an issue, but from this message (prominently displayed beneath the music player) it appears their hands are tied by the music companies:
We have recently made a change to the finetune service. It shouldn’t materially impact your listening, however some might feel that a freedom we previously allowed has been taken away… We’ve implemented a limit to the number of songs that can be skipped per hour (5)… if you use all the skips up at once, you wouldn’t be able to skip again until the hour has passed. Our service uniquely allows you to pick the content directly and in doing so skipping becomes much less important… you did choose that song, right? This has been implemented on the behalf of our content providers. We value our relationships with both our users and our content providers. A service like finetune needs both to exist. Please continue to enjoy finetune, make playlists, discover new music, Rock and Roll.
Finetune’s interface is attractive, but much less configurable than imeem or Mog. However, it’s possible to surf other people’s playlists and embed lists in Blogger or MySpace pages. Overall, Finetune appears a little limited in scope and the inability to forward through songs after an undisclosed limit really needs addressing - damn those pesky record companies!
Recommendation: Finetune is an interesting way to hear new music, though it seems a little limited in its present incarnation.
Visit: Finetune homepage, Music Interfaces Finetune page
A different perspective: ZDNet Review
Goombah
Goombah analyzes your iTunes collection and finds a unique set of matching members that share your taste - your iPod’s soul mates. It recommends their favorite tracks that are not in your collection. Goombah also suggests specific free tracks to download, or you can browse our entire Free Music collection of professionally produced music. Goombah currently draws recommendations from more than 6 million tracks in our members’ collections. Recommendations are changing all the time and new free tracks are added every week on “Free Music Fridays”.
Visit: Goombah
iLike
iLike’s does things a little differently from its immediate competitors, Last.fm and Mog. This is because - rather than the standard web-based interface - installation of the free download results in a drawer appearing to the right of the main iTunes window, as illustrated below:
This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. It’s very convenient to be able to see music recommendations for the artist currently playing. If iLike is able to propose similar music for a particular artist it will list up to five tracks in the upper half of the drawer together with ‘free music by new artists’ in the lower half. Each track has a little play button beside it, pressing this button automatically pauses iTunes and plays a 30 second sample. Clicking the little right-pointing arrow to the right of the listing takes the user to the relevant track on the iTunes Music Store. Two other tabs provide quick access to any Friends you may have made on iLike’s website, the ability to customise the music profile iLike has assembled and access to the user’s iLike homepage to access their inbox, messages, recommendations, etc.
A user’s iLike homepage provides a fairly standard array of lists and options including:
- Recently and most played songs
- Friends
- People with similar tastes
- Playlists (in early preview form)
All of this is cleanly and intuitively executed. The disadvantage of the iTunes drawer is that it uses up valuable screen real-estate, whether or not this is an issue will depend upon the resolution of your monitor - on my Macbook Pro (1440 x 880), it’s just about okay. As I stated in the introduction, recommendations are dependent upon analysis and comparison of other users’ listening habits. This is where iLike is currently less useful than its main competitors because it’s clear that its user base is more limited than market leader Last.fm. Although iLike was reasonably good on a fairly wide range of music including, pop, rock, acid jazz, jazz and funk amongst others, it did fail to come up with any suggestions for anything more underground or obscure. The screenshots below are variously for electronica, world music and techno:
As iLike’s user base grows, I’m sure this will gradually improve and the usefulness of the interface is likely to persuade some potential users to try the service out.
The sidebar is stated to work only with iTunes on Mac OSX and Windows XP, Vista is in the process of being tested and a Windows Media Player version is in preparation (currently it tracks usage, but lacks a user interface).
Recommendation: iLike is well worth trying although the most accurate and in-depth recommendations remain the preserve of Last.fm.
Link: iLike
Link: MusicInterface’s iLike homepage
See also: Overview of music recommendation services
Imeem
The best of social media… imeem is an online community where people and groups can upload, share, tag, and playlist the media they care about. There’s something for everyone:videos, music, photos, playlists, and blogs – plus it’s 100% free!
Here I am trying it out, wondering how to make use of this place. It appears to be a personal media catalogue - I can blog, I can store music (will have to investigate what this means, at time of writing the upload function wasn’t playing ball), video and photos. I can interact with people. My imeem homepage is reasonably configurable - preferences allow me to choose from one of three layouts, an overall colour scheme, add or remove widgets that pull in a variety of feeds, both external (last.fm, NetFlix, del.icio.us, Amazon wishlist, Digg linkrolll, etc.) and internal (blogroll, latest blog post, etc).
Looking at this playlist, it looks pretty reminiscent of a MySpace/Last.fm hybrid, replete as it is with an extended list of user comments. Looking at the same user’s video page, I see something of a resemblance to YouTube. His photo albums are nicely displayed with what I assume is a little sprinkling of Ajax magic. The ability to associate images with extended text makes for a nice alternative to Flickr’s slightly dull layout.
Playlists can be compiled not just for music, but also for photos and videos. The site facilitates browsing via ranking (most played, discussed, favorited, random, etc) for all media. A smaller number of options (popular/random/recent) enables some browsing of imeem groups, blogs and people. So is imeem an attempt at rolling Last.fm/Mog + YouTube + Blogger + Flickr into a single, coherent interface? Maybe.
Recommendation: imeem’s a good choice if you want a single location for all your media, though it inevitably lacks some of the functionality of single media sites; although it offers some music funtionality, go for Last.fm or Mog if you want the bells and whistles.
Visit: Imeem homepage, Music Interfaces imeem page
Last.fm
Last.fm is an Internet radio station and music recommendation system that merged with sister site Audioscrobbler in August 2005. The system builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste, also recommending artists similar to their favorites, showing their favourite artists and songs on a customizable profile webpage, comprising the songs played on its stations selected via a collaborative filter, or optionally, recorded by a Last.fm plugin installed into its users’ music playing application.
I’ve been a user for more than two years so this is the site I can most confidently talk about. Last.FM claims to have a user base of 15 million accounts. Downloading and installing the free plugin enables Last.FM to:
- Compile weekly and overall charts
- Offer recommendations based on current listening habits
- Streamed Last.fm radio stations based on friends, recommendations, favourites, listening habits
- Friends (who may or may not like the same music)
- Purchasable tracks
- List neighbours who are currently listening to similar music
- Shoutbox for quick messages
- Concert notification (based upon personal and friends’ listening habits) - see this post for details
- Journals (last.fm’s name for user blogs)
Recommendation: choose Last.fm for its accuracy of music recommendations, dynamic gig listings, user base, chart listings and radio stations.
Visit: Last.fm, my Last.fm page
Mog
Mog is an increasingly popular music recommendation site along the lines of Last.FM, but with a strong social emphasis as reflected in its strapline ‘discover people through music and music through people’. Mog keeps an eye on users’ music tastes via a system preference panel. Installation - after signing up and obtaining a Mog login and password - results in the panel scanning and uploading data on everything in the user’s music library - in my case my iTunes folder. Uploading such data seemed a little unsettling, but I let this go. As the size of my folder was in the region of 43GB this took some time.
Once set up, the default chocolate-y user homepage displays top artists this month, artist recommendations, last songs played, trusted Mogs (friends), my digital music collection and so on. In the centre of a user’s homepage is the posts column. When writing a new post there are boxes to associate the entry with a particular artist, album, track or other tag as well as uploading an image, mp3, YouTube clip etc. Other people can comment and those comments appear below the post on the user’s homepage.Browsing other MOGs can be done by the default most popular or via user-defined critera (gender, age range, marital status, sexual orientation, country, zip code or geographical location, US only). A pity it’s not possible to search for ‘anyone in the UK currently listening to Rhythm & Sound’, for example, as this would facilitate easy conversation.
User pages are much more configurable than Last.fm’s - colour schemes and backgrounds can be changed or updated with users’ own designs (requires CSS skills); widget-like content areas can be added, removed or repositioned on a preferences page. The interface design is generally very intuitive to use, with the odd caveat. There are two sections on my homepage called titled ’songs you should be listening to’ and ‘artists you should know about’, but 11 days after signing up, Mog hasn’t supplied any recommendations to them. Puzzlingly, it’s possible to edit these sections which makes me wonder whether these are supposed to be for user-generated comments or not.
At time of writing, my Mog preference panel is busy undertaking a “MOG-O-MATIC Content Indexing Progress” so perhaps these sections will update. Design-wise, the fixed width page layout feels a bit cramped and I’ve yet to find a satisfactory page design from the choice available - they seem either too busy or a tad dull.
Recommendation: choose Mog for its lively, highly configurable social functionality.
Visit: Mog, Music Interfaces Mog page
MusicMap
Why do I like MusicMap so much? Because of its simplicity: there’s no signing up, no pressure to make friends, submit data or anything else extraneous: just type in an artist and MusicMap presents you with a cloud of names garnered from Last.fm data, those names being larger or smaller depending upon their relevance to the original query. The recommendations are pretty good, but then Last.fm’s service in this area is, in my experience, currently the most accurate. Nicely presented, my only wish would be that the recommendations were linked to the relevant page on Last.fm. Otherwise, colour me happy.
Recommendation: Use if you want a no fuss, utterly intuitive list of excellent recommendations.
Link: MusicMap
Music-Map
Review to follow.
Visit: Music-Map
Musicovery
An intriguingly different interface allows the user to set a number of parameters such as hit/non-hit, decade, mood, dance tempo and genre on a menu modeled on a TV remote. Once your initial choice is set, a spaghetti cord snakes out across the screen on which a series of tracks are listed - click any of them and the track begins to play. Intuitive, simple and a pleasure to use. The music plays by default in LoFi mode - HiFi is a paid option.
Visit: Musicovery
Pandora
Ever since we started the Music Genome Project, our friends would ask: Can you help me discover more music that I’ll like? Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs. We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.
Visit: Pandora
Seeqpod
Seeqpod isn’t exactly a recommendation site, but it’s almost impossible to resist selecting a wide variety of names from the list of random artists that scrolls continuously down the left hand side of Seeqpod’s homepage. This list consists of whatever music the search engine finds as it grazes the web. Artists can be added to the playlist to save/play later. As an indication of the variety of material Seeqpod turns up, within the space of a couple of minutes I’d assembled a playlist containing Love, Solex, Derek Bailey, Public Enemy, Don Quixote (from the Gutenberg archive), Incredible Bongo Band, Frank Zappa, Fu Schnickens, Joanna Newsom, Rimsky Korsakov and Craig David…Artist Info links are provided beside the artist’s name on the user-assembled playlist. These take you to a Seeqpod page that aggregates links under categories for Videos, Blogs, MySpace, Wikipedia, Lyrics, Buy, Tour Dates and Ringtones. As a front end to a search engine with a specific focus, Seeqpod is impressively intuitive to use. It could do with some spit and polish on its graphic design to improve its credibility, but it’s a great way to try out an artist before buying, rediscover old favourites or simply discover new music.
Visit: Seeqpod
The Filter
Not so long ago half your record collection would sit in the attic, gathering dust. In 2006 it’s more likely to be languishing in the dark recesses of your iPod or laptop, unplayed, unloved. We always think we’ll get round to making great playlists and rediscover hidden gems, but let’s face it, who’s got the time?
So declares The Filter’s homepage. Until last week this free software was only available for PC, but a new Apple-compatible version has just been released. The Filter’s profile is probably significantly higher than its market share due to the frequency with which it’s associated with Peter Gabriel’s name (certainly did the trick for me). It turns out that he’s an investor in the project rather than having much to do with the product’s creative approach.
The Filter acts in partnership with iTunes on Windows XP and OS X (a Windows Media Player version is in development) to:
- Create playlists from a user’s existing music library using user-specified seed tracks.
- Making recommendations, again based upon tracks suggested by the user.
The playlist function is very like the primary purpose of Music IP Mixer, a product I looked at a couple of months ago. Like that program, The Filter is standalone rather than web-based (like Last.fm, Mog, Pandora) or an iTunes plug-in (as per iLike). The main window is an attractive shelf design on which are displayed the upcoming cover graphics for the songs in its active playlist:
An additional window, which can be closed, also opens up with good quality information about the playing track supplied by the AllMusicGuide. By default both windows stay on top of all other open programme windows, which can be rather awkward. The window can be minimised and reopened using a keyboard shortcut, though this still doesn’t make it quite as user-friendly as iLike’s iTunes drawer. It would be good to see the window accessible via its OS X statusbar icon, but such an option isn’t currently available.
To create a playlist, the user chooses three different tracks in iTunes and clicks the ‘F’ button in the player window. My first three seed tracks (Brian Eno’s Energy Fools The Magician, The Durutti Column’s The Beggar and Manu Dibango’s Massa Lemba), chosen on impulse, resulted in a playlist of 15 tracks with five suggested artists and the rest made up of additional tracks by the chosen artists. The suggestions (Peter Tosh, Fela Kuti, John Martyn, Laurie Anderson and U Roy) were reasonably on target. Given the aforementioned proximity of The Filter’s functionality to Music IP Mixer’s, it seemed a good idea to try it out with the same seed. Choosing Erik Satie’s Fantaisie-Valse, Harmonia’s Kekse and a part of Steve Reich’s Three Tales multimedia opera resulted in a different, but still serviceable playlist that included Sufjan Stevens, Vladislav Delay and Bach amongst others. Skipping songs quickly or letting them play through enables The Filter to build a better idea of listening habits. The programme can also build playlists to sync with iPods - these are based on either a chosen genre or, as before, by selecting seed tracks.
The recommendations option produces a window of recommended songs available at the iTunes Music Store:
Some of these recommendations are good, some are not - how Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit relates to Brian Eno’s Another Green World is anybody’s guess… A more mainstream track (Madonna’s Confessions of a Dance Floor) results in a fairly diverse mainstream set of recommendations (Sean Paul, Britney, Cyndi Lauper and Beyonce) which it’s hard to argue with. Clicking any track opens up the iTunes Music Store to listen to the standard 30 second clip and purchase if so desired.
Recommendation: My copy of The Filter tended to hang fairly frequently and was slow at delivering iTMS recommendations, but the program is still in beta so perhaps that can be excused. It’s an interesting product, particularly for its integration with the iTunes Music Store which makes for potentially intuitive discoveries and its ability to supply dynamically refreshed playlists to your iPod. Its ability to offer up forgotten gems from an overstocked iTunes library is also attractive. In my experience, its recommendations have been fairly mixed, but The Filter is definitely worth trying.
Visit: The Filter
Link: Screencast guide to The Filter
Platform: Windows XP and Mac OS X + iTunes only (Windows Media Player in development)
