http://blog.seanmcg.com/?page_id=116

(supposedly, soon, with last.fm integration).

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071002-sony-bmgs-chief-anti-piracy-lawyer-copying-music-you-own-is-stealing.html

In today’s world of more is better, let’s not forget the value of “less is more” and the power of the “editor”. In fact, most people still discover music on the radio. Back in the “old day’s” most of us likely had our choice of one or two rock stations and if we were lucky, the local college station had a segment of “alternative” music. It was very limited, but this is were many of us developed our love of music first. We did things like put radio station bumper sticker on our cars (mostly as a sign of allegiance, often as a form of repair). The local DJ was often considered just as big of a star as the musical artists.

The cool thing about radio is that it reflects the musical interest and mood of a particular town/country/region. In many ways, you can get as sense of what a town is like without ever going there. These day’s my favorite radio station is called “The Current” from Minnesota Public Radio (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/the_current/). I often have it playing in the house (or as a podcast in the car) even though I live about 1000 miles away. The music they play features a lot of local artists and clearly reflect the taste of the local alternative crowd. All the cool music of Minneapolis without the sub-zero temps.. now that’s technology!

- Compatible with any music acquisition method, including p2p.
- Doesn’t even try to algorithmically recommend music; favors getting recommendations through your friends.

http://plurib.us/musicrecommend/

Even Sony is encouraging this now:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080104-lone-holdout-in-drmed-music-recommends-drm-circumvention.html

@db, rip your own ringtones from your purchased songs. There’s no need to ever pay money for a crippled partial-pseudo-song.

with someone who like you, danah, listening to Dr. Toast (who by the way f’in rocked my psychedelic world at the FP new years party at 6am) one evening and Ani the next i can see how LFM would fail at making an enjoyable playlist. what would be really smart is for them to consult a statistician and figure out that they should make a playback feature that respects the multimodality in the data. namely one which allows you to focus on naturally defined subspaces of the listening distribution.

Dan – I have far too many genres to create a separate playlist for each – it would make playlists unusable for me. That’s why I want them to be separate.

Jeffrey – my commenting on ripping CDs is in snarky reference to the hubbub over the Post’s coverage of the latest RIAA lawsuit. Incidentally, it was declared illegal in Europe but the RIAA said they weren’t going to go after users there for it.

@Jeffrey, actually Ripping CDs IS illegal (or at least could become illegal) – it’s actually pretty recent news. Just go on to Google News, and simply search “ripping” and you’ll see a variety of recent articles concerning the RIAA’s latest stance on CD ripping… they’re not prosecuting yet, it seems, but they’re definitely not pleased with it.

For one, I’m a huge music person myself, and I can’t quite classify my own tastes with any suitable titles. I generally use the term “rock” and then shudder when I hear others use “rock” and include bands that I loathe.

Secondly, I actually found myself looking for a decent reliable music resource. I had used Last.FM and Pandora, but I really hated the suggestions I was getting. In fact, I found myself hitting skip more often than not, and stopping only when I landed back on one of the initial bands I had listed as a favorite. I’m not sure what it is with humans and computer algorithms, but we try and apply them to just about every facet of human life. Frankly, I feel like sometimes, they just can’t apply. Particularly when you consider that music preferences is largely dependant on life experiences, cultural experiences, and so on, and so to base music purely based on what other people have listed – it seems very much like a speech bubble without the speech (if that’s not an expression, it should be!)

Anyway, long story short, all I wanted was a reliable source that was purely community driven. Not driven by some back-end heartless computer that couldn’t pass the Turing test if it’s “life” depended on it – but by people. I found that the most reliable resource I ever used was Amazon. I’d just search a band and then see what other people bought. The downside was that more often than not, it gave me the obvious choices.

In the end, I decided to just make my own site, a Wikipedian-like website, where users had complete say in what went on, and could update/modify/rate, and so on. The downside is – I’m a programmer, not a marketing genius – so while the site is live and kicking, it’s not getting anywhere near as many hits as I wish it would…I’m just a lone guy competing with the giants, I guess.

I also tried to go above and beyond music, by including other categories like Movies, Books, and more.

Anyway, I’d be totally interested in getting your opinion/input on things. I’d really appreciate any advice…

The site is: http://www.ifyoulove.net (If you love X, then you’d love Y… catchy, huh?)