Most people at this point listen to a lot of music, often at work and home online. Itunes is sadly huge, and Pandora has been making a good run. In the past six months or so, I came across a couple of other good sites for music as well. One I just thought had a great design and idea, the other one brings a really interesting angle to social music.
1. Designers.mx
Designers.mx is a collection of mixes by designers. There’s nothing overly special about the site, other than that a bunch of designers have been asked to create some mixes of stuff they listen to as they do their thing. They create some cover art as well, and post it on the site. The site design itself is really well done, and there’s some great music to be discovered there. Some mixes have more popular artists, most have people you may not know and are worth checking out. This site is now the background to my work day about 75% of the time.
2. Turntable.fm
Okay, this one is really interesting, and puts social music on a different level. You pick a room, based on style (room name) that you want to go in. Then, up to 5 people in the room can go through a playlist of whatever song they want that’s on the server (and if you have one that’s not on the server, you can upload it). So, you get to listen to a mix that others are creating on the spot, and you can contribute if you want. You’ll find new songs, hear things you forgot about, and play what you like.
There’s some social aspects of it too. There’s a chat on the side for anyone in the room to talk to one another, you can fan people to find them later, and give props to people to give them more credibility (and new avatars). If people in the room don’t like the song, they can vote it down and skip it, giving the next person a shot. It’s like being a team DJ. Hey, if you’d like, you can just stand in the room and let everyone else play, and just use it as background. Worth checking out.
So far, I’ve found a lot of stuff I like from just these two, play less and less of my music, and rarely listen to Pandora at all. They’re worth a shot at least.
