I have been doing a lot of research lately on the future of the music industry. In general, how artists will get their music out into the world, everything from posting it online, to the marketing and buzz generation, through to the selling of the music. As a former music promoter, it is still one of my passions (music that is). In the spirit of keeping on the cutting edge of things, I have decided to create a “Future of Music” posting series. Whenever I come across something that I think will have an impact or be a part of the way we consume music in the future I will post about it.

Lets start off with Audioscrobbler. This is a pretty cool plugin that you install into your media player of choice (iTunes, Windows Media, etc) and it will begin to profile your musical tastes and then match you up with folks with the same interests. Before long it sends along recommendations of new music that you would most likely be interested in based on your genres of interest. Check out the site and type in a few of your favorite artist names, you can instantly see what other people are into as it relates to your musical tastes. This taps into the whole notion of social networking for music, which I believe will have a big part in the future of music. More on that later.

Audioscrobbler:

Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2005 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Music, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.