Blip.fm is "Twitter for music" as it offers a microblog platform for users with the ability to search, upload and share music. Your blip.fm stream is then playable. You can also discover music from other Blip.fm users and give them props if you like a song they played.
JiwaMusic, a Paris, France based music site built on Ruby on Rails by Jiwa SARL that I previously covered, launched into beta in May 2007 to offer users the ability to search, create, share and embed music playlists.
Last week, Jiwa launched a new version of its product to offer more songs (more than 400,000 songs as thousands are added every day), a new design and a brand new player and new ways to share your musical tastes among other things.
I have 20 beta invites so if you are interested in giving the new JiwaMusic a try please drop a comment on this post and I will send one to you.
Continue reading "JiwaMusic Relaunches Social Music Network" »
OUTSHOUTS, a Palo Alto, California based three employee startup, takes 'making music going round' seriously. OUTSHOUTS enables anyone to act as a DJ to create and send their own mixes of your recorded voice and pre-recorded music or other content over email and text message directly to your mobile phone.
Songza, a Chicago-based music startup, will soon launch to offer a new way to search, play and share music online. This free music search offers an extremely minimalist and slick interface to create and play playlists online. Songza's interface was designed by Chicago-based Humanized. Songza is so fresh, they have not even officially launched yet but if
you are in the Chicago-land area this week you might want to attend the
official Songza launch party on Thurday night.
Video Value, a music recommendation site, offers up music video suggestions that you might like. Video Valve gets smarter as you play and rate additional videos. Though Video Valve's low profile layout and branding resembles that of a startup when in reality it is a Viacom product.
Ruckus Networks, a Herndon,Virginia-based startup, has been making some noise on college campuses across the US. Ruckus is a college-only multimedia service offering free ad-supported downloads to college students. After some initial bad reviews, Ruckus seems to be making moves and gaining traction. Ruckus has over 3 million music tracks available and just recently launched a Facebook application, extensive social networking capabilities, and an improved video service just in time for the new school year.
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.
SeeqPod, a "playable search" product born in the UC's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, offers music search that scours the Web for music in both audio and video formats. Upon finding music you can play it immediately and add it to a playlist which can then be embedded into other pages like the playlist I quickly pulled together below. Songs and playlists can be shared via email or embedded into other sites. In fact, I learned about SeeqPod from a friend of mine, David Robinson after he shared a playlist and was enthusiastic about the product.
One Llama, a product of six employee Champaign, Illinois-based startup One Llama Media, leverages audio analysis, search and discovery systems to offer a place for music lovers to discover, listen, share and buy new music. Though in the music discovery category, One Llama differs from Last.fm, Pandora and MyStrands by focusing more on search result technology rather than community aspects of music discovery.
One Llama's users interface design is fun and light. Users can search for new music by song or artist and search results are returned in a flashy cluster experience (shown in the screen-shot below) that reminds me of Visual Thesaurus or Quintura.
Users can create playlists on their own or One Llama will create a playlist with recommended songs that are similar to a song or songs you have identified. One Llama created a quick list of recommended songs based off of one song I liked. I was then given the option to share, save or buy these tracks or the playlist. I have shared the list below as an embeddable widget but you can also share it directly to Facebook.
If you like a song you can purchase is on iTunes or Amazon. One Llama also offers an iTunes plug-in which links the web to your desktop music making it even easier to find and purchase the songs you just discovered on One Llama.
In talking with Director of Product Development, Amit Sudharshan, a recent graduate of University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, he explained that:
"One Llama believes finding music should be a 'fun' experience that people should be able to discover, enjoy and share."
As a music lover myself, I would have to agree. Currently, One Llama uses collaborative filtering to offer up song and playlist recommendations but Amit mentioned that audio signal extraction technology is coming very soon. This will enable One Llama to offer music search technology which uses collaborative filtering to recommend songs that people usually play together as well as signal extraction technology to recommend songs that sound alike. One Llama recently partnered with EMI and APM to power their search and find songs that "sound like" other songs within the APM library.
Sticking with it's 'fun' mission, One Llama shows its lighter side by allowing users the ability to personalize their llama avatar. My llama avatar is shown to the right.
Bottom-line: One Llama offers an innovative music search and discovery technology that is fun and easy to use. I had fun using One Llama and I think you will too.
Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail's Guide To Building, Growing & Celebrating Startup Success by Frank Gruber
