iTunes has been offering personalized recommendations within the iTunes application for quite sometime and I have found them to be very accurate and helpful. I have often discovered new songs that I like within the recommendations and downloading them quickly for instant gratification. iTunes has started to role out syndication of personalized music data as My iTunes Widgets, making it easy to share your music interests.
You can enable My iTunes via your iTunes account and have the option to enable the syndication of:
My iTunes Purchase History - The most recent music, music videos, TV shows, and movies you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store.
My iTunes Favorites - The artists whose music you’ve purchased the most from the iTunes Store.
My iTunes Reviews - The most recent music, music videos, TV shows, and movies you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store.
Niall Kennedy recently offered some interesting analysis of My iTunes and said this of the personalization aspects:
"These new feeds from Apple make it even easier for external websites to integrate your purchase history into a recommendation engine."
There are a number of other applications like MyStrands, MOG, Last.fm, SeeqPod, Pandora, JiwaMusic, midomi, Riffs and One Llama which offer music recommendations algorithmically or community contributed. These applications can now benefit by leveraging the personal data of iTunes, which is one of the most popular music stores, which could further improve the relevance of the recommendations.
You can get My iTunes Widgets here but if making your personal history and music favorites public is not your thing then just opt not to. I have embedded My iTunes Favorites widget below which leverages my most purchased artists feed.
