4 Sites To Help You Discover New Music and Artists
I’ve been listening to a lot of music lately on my computer and because of a few sites been able to discover new music and artists based upon music I already like. There are four music discovery sites that have helped me expand my music library. Hopefully, they will expand your music horizons as well.
1. liveplasma – With liveplasma all you need to do is type in an artist or band and you will see a visual map of related artists. I like the band Coldplay and so I did a search and found other artists/bands similar to them to check out.
The closer an artist/band is to your search item, the more closely related it is and the greater the chance that you will like it. The halo around a band represents its popularity to the style of music. Same colored bands represent similar styles. Thus Coldplay and Radiohead are of the same music style. By clicking on an artist/band you can change the focus of the map and discover even more music.
Not only can you discover new music with liveplasma but you can also discover new movies and actors based upon your favorites. If you set up an account you can save your favorite artists/bands and look back at previous searches.
2. TuneGlue – Another visualization map of artists/bands based upon a favorite. You can select how many nodes per result, it starts at 6. Then you can expand you map by clicking on one of the bands and that opens another node.
When you click on any band name you can get their discography which is a nice feature. With liveplasma you only got a discography of the band your search was performed on. You can also visit the band’s website if they have on as well as register for news. I could spend hours playing around with Tuneglue which finds music relationships by using data from last.fm (which will be discussed) and Amazon.
3. Pandora Internet Radio – With Pandora you build streaming radio stations based on an artist/band or song. Pandora picks out songs similar in style or genre based upon your likes. As a radio station is established you can select whether you like or dislike a song and the next song pick is based upon that input. You can also add more music to a station to tweak it even more. Think of it as your own personal DJ.
Pandora offers free music streaming and you can build up to 100 customized radio stations which you can share with others. The nice thing about Pandora is that you can listen to your radio stations from any computer since it is web based, nothing to download. It does use a browser window though with Open Pandora (for use with Internet Explorer) you can hide the application to your system tray yet still have the control to rate songs, pause and skip music. If you are using Firefox then download the Foxytunes plugin
4. last.fm – This site lets you discover new music as well as through a downloaded player listen to music stations with artists similar to each other. last.fm is a social music platform that makes personalized music recommendations, connects members with similar tastes and provides custom music streams. Again, this is a site you can get lost in. Type in the name of an artist/band and it brings up an overview, sample tracks, bio, albums, similar artists/bands, pictures, events and more.
last.fm is by far the most comprehensive music discovery tool on the web. It matches members up with each other helping to expand each others music horizons. Also, either through their downloaded player or members media players playlists of music are uploaded to their servers (called scrobbling) expanding their database of musicians and their relationships to each other. It’s quite impressive and a great way to delve into the world of music.
tags: liveplasma, TuneGlue, Pandora, last.fm, music
Similar Posts:
- None Found
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment