Music Machinery

MOG has posted a video demonstrating their new playlist editor for the soon to be released MOG all access.

It looks pretty nifty – lightweight, tag-able, shareable playlists.  It’s nice to see MOG paying attention to playlists.   With millions of songs to chose from, music discovery gets to be a big problem.   Playlists can help with that.   Of course, playlists bring their own discovery problems. How can I discovery new playlists that contain music that I like?   Currently, most sites that support playlists and playlist sharing only provide limited ways for people to discover new playlists. However, as playlists become more ubiquitous, sites like MOG will need to expand the tools for helping people find new and interesting playlists.  Some options for playlist discovery:

• Search for playlists by tag.  Example: “Find playlists tagged ’emo’ and ‘christmas'”
• Search for playlist by artist / track.  Example: “Find playlists that have songs by Deerhoof”
• Query by example.  Example: “Find playlists that are similar to this playlist”
• Popularity. Example:  “Play me the most popular playlists” or “Play me the Billboard hot 100”
• Social discovery.  Example: “What playlists are my friends listening to now?”
• Expert curated. Example: “Give me the Pitchfork 100 playlist”
• Machine made.  Example: “Build me a playlist that is similar to this playlist” or “Build me a playlist for tags: ’emo’, ‘female’, ’90s'”
• Recommended playlists. Example: “Find me playlists that I will like based upon my music taste and my context (e.g. the time of day).

It’s good to see MOG working hard to make the creation of playlists easy. Next step is to make finding new and interesting playlists easy.