Musicstrands is a music discovery and search engine that I wrote about last December. They launched new features recently (including some today) that make it an excellent side service to whatever music player you use.
Co-founder Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria took me through some of their new features last week. MusicStrands works best as a companion to iTunes (they have a PC plugin available on the home page, a Mac version is coming soon (I am testing an unreleased beta on my machine and it works great).
The service watches what you listen to, and starts to draw associations based on those behaviors. If you have a number of songs included in a playlist, they become associated. If you listen to a group of songs, they become associated, etc. “We are building a huge matrix of correlations between songs and artists” Gabriel said in explaining it to me. And users can use that matrix to discover new music and build playlists.
Here are some of the new features:
- playlist builder, it basically tells you: other people who have the same music as you have, and want to listen to the same type of music as you want to listen to now, they would build playlists with the proposed songs. For those who have thousands of songs, this is a key feature to help them rediscover their music libraries, and help them fill their iPods. If you use the iTunes plugin, MusicStrands will look at the current music that you have in your library and help you build playlists from that music. This is absolutely killer - I have so much music that I’ve never listened to (ripping friends cds, etc.).
- The m-charts, the coolest is the m-chart of your “recently played tracks”, the m-chart automatically updates as you listen to music, so your friends and readers can easily discover music through your listening behavior. You can customize it to your favourite colors, sizes, formats, etc.
- social listening: it helps you know real-time what your friends are listening to. Because friends are the best source for music discovery, MyStrands tells you what are your contacts listening to, right now, and it also tells you who else is listening to the same song as you are listening now.
- world map - tells you who is listening to what songs, where.
Take a look at MusicStrands Labs to see additional features they are working on. In my opinion, there are a lot of interesting features to help users discover music; but the killer feature is the plugin for iTunes to help you build relationships in your own music library that you didn’t know existed.
The “correlations” idea is very neat. The Google Music Store story also appeared yesterday….interesting days ahead.
I hate to self promote, but you should also check out Musicmobs (http://www.musicmobs.com). We have some feature overlap with Musicstrands (for instance our client Mobster has been able to auto-generate playlists in iTunes for quite some time), but both services differ in many ways. Between us, Musicstrands, Last.fm and Pandora there’s quite a lot of interesting things going on in this space.
Why is everything only working on either iTunes or Windows Media Player?
Cool but it seems less advanced than Last.fm for example which supports almost all mediaplayers. I prefer Foobar2000 over Itunes for example (which I really don’t like).
>>Comment by Matti Leppänen — April 4, 2006 @ 11:37 pm
Why is everything only working on either iTunes or Windows Media Player? >>
Matt,
This probably occurs for the same reason that desktop apps are developed for Windows BEFORE the Mac OS X and Linux or the same reason people tend to develop for IE and Firefox before being compatable with Opera,etc: Marketshare. In most cases, it just makes more sense to launch on the platforms that have the most users first. However, early adopters that will gravitate towards new services tend to use Firefox,etc so it doesnt always mean that you will gain the most traction that way by targeting the mass market of users.
buggy. Crashed. The login/account creation process was an ordeal during which I came very close to giving up on.
“Why is everything only working on either iTunes or Windows Media Player?”
They should team up with Tunatic to work with every player by just listining to the output.
How do these folks make money? Are they just waiting to be bought out. This makes no sense to me. They develop a non-monetized fringe technology… feels like a dotcom play.
Having serious issues syncing my library. Drops at about 20000 songs(halfway). Anyone else having trouble?
I’m guessing this is kinda like Muiso?
I don’t know how many players Muiso supports, but it supports winamp, and if I remember correctly it says it supports portable devices when installing. It’s fairly young at the moment tho. But it will give you previews of recommendations within the player like MusicStrands, plus lyrics (not the biggest database tho).
can you click on recommendations and listen to previews? that would be killer.
I just tried it out and I didn’t like it. Sure the idea is cool, who doesn’t want to find new music to listen to and the engine for matching songs was pretty good. The playlist editor was very hard for me to understand at first but eventually it did an ok job at playlist creation but nothing that makes me jump for joy. Also when you do find something you like that is related to what you want you get a very very poor sample of it (Could have just be me). Also it takes a few clicks to find where to buy the song you have just found. Wouldn’t you want to get people buying tracks, isn’t this really what these services are about??? Also I found most of the obscure stuff didn’t even have somewhere to buy them from.
So thats my two cents
MusicIP ( http://www.musicip.com ) offers some similar features as well. They thumbprint each song though (and actually supply the IDs for Music Brainz ( http://musicbrainz.org ) now as well.
MusicIP’s site looks a bit corporate, but I talked with them at SXSW and saw a demo and was very impressed with their MusicIP Mixer program.
i personally hate musicstrands for 1 reason.
it doesn’t let you switch it off, you have to uninstall it. by switching off, i mean, it takes forever to open mediaplayer with musicstrands open, and it makes you wait after opening. i don’t now about the new versions, but they should better integrate a switching off mechanism.
last.fm is far better in user experience.
This is one of the best social networks / tagging application / website out there. Great understanding of the user’s experience and every function needed. Thanks Mike for introducing us
I’ve been running this since I read it here.
1. The product doesn’t shut down properly and holds up shutting down my laptop.
2. The music tagging is mediocre. It barely registers 25 percent of my iTunes library (about 25000 songs)
3. There is no link to buy a song from iTunes, or if there is, it didn’t jump out at me.
4. I don’t social network, so I didn’t try those features.