Thing 42: Music 2.0

I had a Pandora account for a while on my old computer. Pandora gives you the opportunity to "create your own radio station". The way it works is that you tell Pandora what groups/artists/songs/musical pieces you like, and Pandora will not only try to locate what you requested in its database, but it will also try to find music in its database with a similar sound to what you enjoy. I did not ressurect my Pandora account because the variety of music was very limited, and the tracks that Pandora had from famous artists were rarely the hits. One could argue what I expect for free, and the truth is...I expect a lot!

Today I created a last.fm account and profile. I like the layout of last.fm much better than Pandora. I did a search for "Hans Zimmer", and not only received a brief bio of the artist, but right off the bat a list of free tracks available for download into my music library, as well as comments ("shouts") as to which tracks were good, and recommendations from Last.fm on similar artists. Also fun was watching a slideshow of Hans Zimmer photos while listening to the music. So I started to create a library, and discovered that I can also add tracks from other sources to this library as well. I will have fun playing with this new toy for a while!

Some music from my youth...

Bronski Beat

Erasure

Ofra Haza

It is amazing what you will find there!

I also took a look at blip.fm. You can send music recommendations to your Twitter or LiveJournal account from blip, but you have to upload your own music from publicly hosted mp3s over the Internet. To be honest, this is a pain! I am surprised that blip does not allow you to send music or videos to Facebook, but if you have a Ping.fm account linked to Facebook, that trumps all.