Music Recommendation Options For Software Users

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Apple's Genius and MySpace Music jump on the music recommendation bandwagon

Isn't that what last.fm is for?

If you were reading this article on a social networking site, chances are there would be a large annoying flash ad over this text right now.

The desire to not only get eyeballs on the page but to maximise that exposure is becoming so great that surfing the web is rapidly turning into a 'spot how to close the flash ad competition'.

Therefore, it can only be with some degree of suspicion that we greet the arrival of new features designed to retain users and stop them going elsewhere.

Firstly, we have Apple’s new music recommendation service Genius that is built into the latest version of iTunes, and MySpace Music's new recommendation service.

MySpace

Are people still using MySpace?

iTunes

iTunes and "Genius"

Do One Thing And Do It Well.

But hang on a minute - rather than use something which is essentially an afterthought to maintain our interest, why not instead use the dedicated music recommendation site Last.fm?

The inability to drag and drop mp3 files from a PC window directly into iTunes is still a major usability flaw which penalises the user because Apple want to maintain a monopoly. I'd much rather they sorted that out than introduce "Genius", a feature that is about 3 years behind the rest of the internet.

MySpace Music already has an enormous online community so their music recommendation angle is at least logical even if MySpace still has terrible compression on the music they make available.

The User Will Always Go Elsewhere.

iTunes is destined to go the way of RealPlayer if it doesn't start to deliver genuine usability over gimmicks like Genius. You'd think Apple would have learned from Microsoft's mistake of aggressively pushing WMAs and WMVs.

As it stands, Microsoft's inbuilt audio and video options in Vista are a massive usability improvement. If the application does exactly what I want it to then there's no need to look for a 3rd party application.

It was only by accepting that they couldn't control everything (ie. audio & video file types and creation methods) that Microsoft, via Vista, actually started to give the user a better experience than the one XP offered. Now I enjoy using Windows Media Player.

Likewise, I would probably use iTunes more often, and thereby Genius, if Apple similarly stopped trying to control user behaviour.

Besides, don't we all see what our friends are listening to via Last.fm or Facebook anyway..?

last.fm

Last.fm - dedicated site for music recommendations

Social networking sites and music recommendations to friends: which sites and software do you use?

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