I visit dozens of new websites every week and a lot of them are absolutely fantastic. Instead of hording these Internet gems all to myself, I’ve decided to share some of them with my fellow netizens. Here’s the deal, I will pick one website a week that really stands out amongst the rest and then write about it here. I shall call this segment……..WEBSITE OF THE WEEK! I know what you are thinking, how did I ever come up with such a brilliant an original title? One word,… laziness. And there you have it. Let’s move on.
This week’s Website of the Week choice is musicovery.com. Like Last.fm and Pandora, musicovery is a music discovery site which helps to match listeners with music that they might be interested in based on their musical tastes.
The first thing you see when you go to the site is a control panel of sorts on the left hand side of website. From here you can choose what you want to listen to, and there are multiple ways of doing this. The first set of options include LoFi and HiFi. To listen to HiFi you need a paid subscription. I don’t have a paid subscription, so LoFi it is. The next set of options include Hit, non Hit, and Discovery. You can choose any combination of the these three options, but at least one must be checked. Hit and non Hit are pretty obvious as to what they are, the Discovery option isn’t so clear though. I assume it grabs independent or otherwise lesser known artists and adds them to the play list. I can’t find any documentation to confirm this though, so I could be wrong.
Up next is an interactive time line. If you leave it as is, it will simply tell you the era in which the song being played originates from. For a little more control, you can use the time line to narrow down your music discovery session to a specific decade, or even year.
Below the time line is the matrix. There are four points on the matrix: calm, energetic, dark, and positive. By clicking on the matrix, you are telling musicovery what kind of mood you want the music to reflect. Experimenting with this is half the fun of musicovery. Once you click a spot on the matrix, a variety of songs will appear to the right. These songs are all color coded by genre, but all share the same characteristics of the matrix, i.e. calm, energetic, dark, positive. So, if you clicked somewhere in between energetic and positive, all the songs that are displayed will have these specific traits in common, whether they be reggae, blues, funk or disco.
What if you want to listen to something energetic, but you’re only interested in one specific musical genre such as rock? No problem. Below the matrix are color coded buttons which list specific genres. When you click on one of these buttons, a mini-matrix is displayed for that particular genre. This mini-matrix works the same way as the main matrix, but only the results of that specific musical genre will be displayed. You may have noticed that the songs displayed to the right of the control panel are now all of one color, in this case dark blue. Dark blue represents the musical genre rock. Pretty cool, huh? They do seem to be missing some popular genres though, but we’ll chalk that up to them being new. All in all this is a very fun website to play around with.
Another great feature is the ease in which musicovery lets you purchase the songs you are currently listening too. Each song has an iTunes and Amazon link associated with it that will take you directly to that product for an easy check out. Actually, it’s probably not a great feature for impulse buyers, but for everyone else it’s great.
I could write more, but I don’t think I’d do the site any justice. It’s one of those things that you just have to try out for yourself, but if you love music, you’ll most likely love musicovery.
http://musicovery.com
Filed under: Google, Links, Music, Internet, How To's
1 Comment
I can’t think of a practical use for this, but I want it.
