www.audioscrobbler.com
The idea of recommending music based on yours and others' preferences dates back -- on the Web, at least -- to an MIT project called Firefly that asked people to rate bands from which it predicted likes and dislikes.
Amazon, also, currently offers music matching your buying habits.
But these approaches have flaws. I don't buy all my music at Amazon and I don't necessarily end up liking everything I buy. And when someone asks me for my favorite musicians, I'm more likely to tell them about the most recent bands that have caught my fancy, and not that I regularly chill out to old fave Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler."
Audioscrobbler is a software-and-web-site combination that goes beyond self-professed preferences and keeps track of what you actually listen to.
Then it breaks down that data and shows you a profile of the songs and musicians you like and recommends other people who share similar song interests, in a process called collaborative filtering.
It's a laudable project being undertaking by a single computer science student in the U.K., and because of that, the limits to Audioscrobbler currently are many, but surmountable: You need to listen to your music via a computer, not a stereo; you need to use a program that can communicate with Audioscrobbler; you need to have catalogued your songs correctly; and the site itself has had problems because of the load of recording what everyone with the software plug-in installed is listening to at any given moment. If this service becomes a standard add-in for many audio players, and I hope it does, it would have to be much more robust. Also, a broader user base would probably unseat Radiohead from its current most-listened-to spot on the Audioscrobbler charts.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the site has no privacy policy, possibly because it's entirely your choice to use it and it exists for the purpose of letting other people find out what you listen to. So if you don't want the whole Web to know you listen to Raffi in the morning, don't sign up.
Got a site to share with me? Email tfsmith@reedbusiness.com
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