Music Machinery

Sten has posted a link to his super nifty Music  Explorer FX.  Music Explorer FX is  a Java Fx application for exploring and discovering music.  In some ways, the application is like a much slicker version of  Music Plasma or Musicovery.  You can explore a particular neighborhood in the music world – looking at artist photos and videos, listening to music, reading reviews and blog posts, and following paths to similar artists.    It’s a very engaging application that makes it easy to learn about new bands.    I especially like the image gallery mode – when I find a band that I think might be interesting, I hit the play button to listen to their music, and then enter the image gallery to get a slide show of the band playing.  Here’s an example of ‘Pull Tiger Tail’ – a band that I just learned about today while exploring with MEFX.

Sten uses a number of APIs to make MEFX happen. He uses the Echo Nest for artist search and to get all sorts of info including artist familiarity, hotness, artist similarity, blogs, news, reviews and audio. He gets artist images from Flickr and Last.fm – and just to make sure he’s relevant in this Twitter-centric world, he uses the Twitter API to let you tweet about any interesting paths you’ve taken through the music space.

We are living in a remarkable world now – there’s such an incredible amount of music available. There are millions of artists creating music in all styles.  The challenge for today’s music listener is to find a way to navigate through this music space to find music that they will like.  Traditional music recommenders can help, but I really think that applications like the MEFX that enable exploration of the music space are going to be important tools for the adventurous music listener