Floppyhead – Digital Media and Streaming

When you are in high school or college, music is a social medium. Kids are passionate about artists that they like then give that music to friends to listen to. As I get older, I am getting exposed to new music less and less. That is until I found Pandora, which takes your input (artists, songs) and feedback (“I like this”, “I don’t like this”) and uses the Music Genome Project to create stations that play songs that are musically similar to what you have said that you have liked. Here is a quick list of music sites (besides Pandora) that provide suggestions of music based on your input and recommendations. Consider them your own personal radio stations.

1. Last.fm – Last.fm is essentially a web-based, user-programmed radio station. The system builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste, 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.The tiny application runs in the background, tracking your playlists in iTunes and other popular players. It then streams a playlist made up of songs by artists similar to the ones you like based on similar tastes of other Last.fm users.
2. iLike – The main tool in iLike is the iTunes sidebar which can be downloaded and installed once you signup with the site. The iLike sidebar is an iTunes plugin that adds a sidebar to iTunes and provides music recommendations based on what you’re listening to at the time. The sidebar also syncs to and updates your iLife profile so others know what you’re listening to (more or less just like Last.fm).
3. Qloud. Qloud music search allows a number of search options as users can search for music by artist, song, keyword, genre or a number of other criteria. Upon finding a song it can be previewed, added to a wishlist, sent to a friend or purchased from a number of different music services. Qloud enables users to better organize music collections with tagging via the use of the Qloud iTunes Plugin. Upon installing the Qloud iTunes Plugin I found it could definitely help to find music within iTunes.This is my least favorite of the three sites on this list.