I’m feeling a bit nostalgic as I listen to some of my Euro-Techno and Electronica that I bought on CD between 1999 and 2001, but wouldn’t have bought if there weren’t great services out there like MongoMusic at the time. That was during the peak of Napster, before it became the pale shadow of its former self it is today. That’s right. The amount of CDs I bought went up tenfold during that period. I was finding new artists I had never heard of from all over the world. They had developed technology that could analyze a song and categorize it based on beats per minute, tempo, and all that other stuff. You could do searches based on similar song, similar artist, or even similar album. And you could listen to 30 second streams to get a pretty good idea whether you’d like the CD or not. What was the best part of it all? It actually worked. That was, until Microsoft bought them out and locked me out.
I haven’t bought a non-Anime or non-Game soundtrack since. I simply don’t know what’s out there. I created an AudioScrobbler (a.k.a. Last.fm) account when they were brand new, but I wasn’t getting good enough recommendations on their system, as I didn’t have my songs properly rated on my own system to do so (which has since been alleviated). Plus they were always going down. It looks like they’ve corrected most of their problems, and their similar artists actually seem fairly similar, so I will likely start up again fairly soon. I’ve also tried MusicBrainz, but somehow Kenny G and Bon Jovi don’t seem all that similar to me. And my music I tried with their tagging software didn’t give me very accurate results. Again, maybe that has changed since I tried it a year or so ago.
Long story short: bring back MongoMusic! For the time being, I can probably get buy with AudioScrobbler and iTMS.
Technorati Tags: audioscrobbler, music, itunes, recommendations
