Crave

If you're a person who loves live music but hates having to keep up on when your favorite bands are coming into town, there's a great new service for you. It's called Songkick, and it's been designed to help you stay on top of upcoming concert dates, as well as discover new music from your existing tastes. It's making a complicated process wonderfully simple, and I expect it to be the next big thing in live music in the same way that Last.fm and Pandora were with prerecorded music tracks.

To figure out what you like in the first place, the service makes it easy by letting you import the library data from iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media player using a small plug-in. That same plug-in will also update the data if you add new music to your collection.

Each artist has a page on Songkick that lists some similar bands as well as pricing and direct links to buy the tickets from 17 different vendors. Users can also leave comments (called "two cents") about a band, although CEO Ian Hogarth told me they might add a bona fide rating system to complement it later on. Also on artist pages, and an integral part of the service is the blog listing guide. Songkick will scour the web and pull up any references to the band or artist in blog posts. These show up in reverse-chronological order on the band page, and can be toggled with upcoming tour dates.

Battle of the bands tracks three different bands of your choice against MySpace activity and sales data. (Click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

To compliment the band mentions on blog posts there's a really great service the team has built called battle of the bands. Like Alexa and Compete, battle of the bands lets you compare up to three bands together to see which one's been the most "hot" in the past five weeks based on various interactions on MySpace as well as mentions in blog posts, and the Amazon.com sales rank. The system is built to accept other streams of data, so if and when Facebook begins to make the data on artist pages a little more transparent, those numbers could be integrated into the stats too.

This third leg of the service, called "BandSense" is a very novel concept. Bloggers who want to opt into the service can embed a line of Javascript into a single post or their entire blog template and get links to bands at the bottom of a post if they're mentioned. It's not just any a link spamming option, the service will only create links for bands only that are on tour. Clicking the band link in the blog goes straight to the tour dates and ticket pricing information, and if a user buys a ticket, the blog owner gets a cut. To compliment the system and keep bands you don't like (but mentioned) off your blog, you can create a blacklist. These blacklisted artists will get no such link love.

In the future Hogarth tells me there will be music integration on the Songkick band pages as well as the recommendations so you can listen to some tracks without having to navigate offsite. The only delay has been finding a way to do it democratically with all of the music hosting services out there. Songkick already has integration on partnered sites like Qloud and Seeqpod, and in the future intends to spread its tour date and recommendation engine even further.

The MyDJ sidebar lets you autogenerate playlists without leaving iTunes.

Late Monday afternoon, music recommendation engine MusicIP released a beta of its MyDJ iTunes plug-in for Windows (available as a free download from the company site). I've spent the last few hours playing with the plug-in, and thus far I'm impressed. Like the company's standalone program, MusicIP Mixer 1.6, the MyDJ iTunes plug-in scans and analyzes your music library to ferret out similar songs and artists. But the standalone software requires you to organize music in MusicIP, then export the playlist to your media player software. The plug-in lets you automatically generate playlists without leaving iTunes.

Downloading and installing MyDJ was easy, and after the program conducted a basic analysis of my library I was ready to build my first playlist. (The "extended" analysis takes a bit longer; more on that below.) In iTunes I clicked on a track from my current musical obsession, The Helio Sequence, then moved to the MusicIP sidebar on the right-hand side of the screen. From there I could designate the length of my playlist--based on number of songs, length of time, or file size--and decide whether I wanted the list to favor the style of the song, the style of the artist, or a balance of the two. The plug-in also let me dictate the degree to which the mix matched my selected song, on a scale from zero ("tightly focused") to nine ("very diverse"). Clicking on "Make Playlist" almost instantly generated a playlist inside of iTunes. As an avid consumer of the free mp3s from CNET Download.com Music, I was thrilled to see that MyDJ had called up some really great tracks that were hidden deep in my iTunes library.

The sidebar also includes a window labeled "Similar to the selected track," which lists a handful of free tunes that match your song's profile. You can click on a song to give it a listen and, if you like it, click one button to download it and add it to your library. This feature has potential to be amazing, but at this point the catalog of discoverable music seems a bit thin. It offered up the same recommendations for several dissimilar songs, and sometimes none of the recommended tracks seemed like a decent match. The more distinctive the song, of course, the more relevant the recommendations: my southern-fried alt-country tunes achieved more appealing matches than generic-sounding indie rock.

Being a beta release, MyDJ for iTunes does have a few quirks. My biggest complaint lies with the user interface, which right now just sits on top of the right side of your iTunes window. There's currently no option to independently move or even resize the sidebar; instead you're forced to resize your iTunes window to leave room for MusicIP. I'd prefer to have a few display options, including placing the control panel at the bottom of the window, in lieu of the iTunes MiniStore. Also, Mac users are left out for now, though the company does plan to release an Mac OS X version "in the near future."

A final note of caution: the program's "extended analysis" of music files, which presumably would bring even more accurate recommendations, definitely eats up some CPU cycles. I was glad the program let me choose among Low, Normal, or High CPU usage in the Preferences, but even the Normal level completely monopolized the ancient 1.5GHz Pentium 4 machine that I use as my music server. Those with poky processors or large music collections will likely want to run the analysis overnight. I plan to do just that and will update this post in the morning with any new insights.

The folks over at Trademork have uncovered a trademark filed by the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) for the name "SoundUnwound." In the description, IMDb lists the potential future service as:

"Providing information regarding, and in the nature of, social networking services; online social networking services designed for people with a common desire to meet other people with similar interests; Social networking services for music enthusiasts."

While IMDb is currently limited to movies, TV shows, and other visual mediums, it's also expanded into a resume service as well as offering video games. The company is owned by Amazon.com, which just happens to be a massively popular music provider, both for optical media as well as digital downloads. While Amazon hasn't released sales numbers since the launch of their DRM-free music service in late September, what's a better way to leverage a large catalog than with an integrated user community? IMDb is already selling movies inside their site, using Amazon.com's catalog and kicking users off via affiliate links. The same could easily be done with Amazon's music catalog, which is to be expected of SoundUnwound.

What's a bit interesting is that Amazon hasn't chosen to simply pick up one of the current sites that are offering social matching based on music taste, including iLike, Last.fm, and MyStrands (which incidentally took $24M in funding this morning); the first two of which have successful Facebook apps in addition to their own communities. Amazon must be looking to either provide deeper integration or leverage their own account system, which would let users buy music without requiring a separate registration. Stay tuned.