How Do You Find Good Music Online?

Culture

from the not-so-easy dept

We’ve been arguing here for a long time that offering up music for free online is a great (free!) way for musicians to promote themselves. The problem, then, is what happens when lots of musicians follow through on such a plan and there’s so much music out there that it’s impossible to find what you like? The record labels would have you believe that’s why they have A&R guys: to sort through the crap and provide you with the best of the best. Unfortunately, these days, the big labels aren’t necessarily looking for the best of the best, but the most marketable to the widest possible audience. The way I find music is that I have a few friends whose musical tastes I trust. They know what I like, and when they say, “hey, you should check out this band,” I usually do – and, more often than not, I’m happy I did. Building up those same sorts of “trusted recommender” systems online is possible, but not that easy. Part of the original promise of music sharing networks was that you could find those with similar tastes and look through their collections to find other artists you hadn’t heard of – or better yet, communicate with the person directly to see who they might recommend. The record labels, of course, hate this idea, because it takes away their function, and puts promotions into the hands of just about anyone. I like this method much better than the “collaborative filtering” process that’s becoming popular again – partly because the record labels can harness it themselves instead of leaving the recommending up to the riff raff. Collaborative filtering looks for all the people who are sort of similar to what you like and looks for other musicians they tend to like, but which you haven’t rated yet. The problem here, again, is that it gets watered down. You’re only discovering new acts after many others have, and some of the more obscure but great acts may get filtered out. Still, there are some intriguing new collaborative filtering tools that people are gravitating towards. The article discusses the relatively new iRATE radio which has been getting a lot of attention lately. It’s basically an online jukebox that uses collaborative filtering to try to hone in on the music you like.