Music discovery in mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
As a game, Herd It’s purpose is to connect fans, share music and make fun! But Herd It is also part of a bigger picture that’s making it possible for everyone to find the perfect song for every occasion.
When you play Herd It and tag songs with words, we learn from you how to find songs with similar descriptions. Google makes it possible to search billions of web pages and, even though you don’t know the exact page or URL you’re looking for, describing what you want with words gives pretty good results. In the same way, Herd It powers a music discovery engine that makes it possible to use words to describe the music you want, search through millions of songs (over 10 million on iTunes and now add MySpace…) and find the perfect tune!
Stay tuned – Herd It search will soon be entering a private Beta testing release. In the meantime, there are other cool, interesting and odd ways of finding the music you want though. Here are just a few that we like:
Search by similarity – “I like this song, give me more like it”. Examples: pandora.com, iTunes Genius feature.
Search by emotion – “I want a song that is dark and calm”. Examples: musicovery.com, AMG Tapestry
Search by genre - “I like hip-hop, yo!”. Examples: AllMusic.com, any record store (if you remember what they are)
Search by color - “Gimme pink songs”. Example: guitarati.com (Herd It’s color minigame will find out if this method makes any sense!)
Search by song/artist name – “I want to hear the new song by Franz Ferdinand”. Example: iTunes
Search by singing/humming – “Naahh nah nah nanana naahh, nanana naaah, hey Jude”. Examples: Shazam, MiDoMi
What other music discovery methods do you like / use?
Written by herdit
October 1st, 2009 at 12:42 pm
The one thing I think is missing from this list is the “passive/indecisive” mode. I often get friends asking something along the lines of “give me something new!”, but without any other input. I’m in this boat pretty often myself.
Content-based search is pretty much doomed here, but social networks can come to the rescue. This is one thing I like about last.fm’s separation of “friends” (social network) and “neighborhoods” (collaborative filtering).
Blogs work pretty well for this too, but they’re trickier to manage without a unified interface. RSS aggregators can only go so far. Perhaps twitter can be the way of the future for social music recommendation?
bmcfee
1 Oct 09 at 1:56 pm
I discover music by listening to music online at KCRW.com When I hear a song I like, I jot the name of the track and artist on a piece of scrap paper.
Daniel Kane
8 Oct 09 at 3:24 pm
[...] month, I posted about different types of music discovery tools available online. Now Herd It has just invented a new way to find [...]
Herd It
6 Nov 09 at 1:29 am