I wrote an application over the weekend called Music Maze. The Music Maze lets you wander through the maze of similar artists until you find something you like.  You can give it a try here:  The Music Maze (be forewarned, the app plays music upon loading).

We’ve seen the idea behind the Music Maze in other apps like Musicovery and Tuneglue’s Music Map.  The nifty thing about the Music Maze is that I didn’t have to write a single line of server code to make it all happen.  The Music Maze web app talks directly to The Echo Nest API.   There’s no middle man.  The artist graph, the album art, the links to audio – everything are pulled on demand from the Echo Nest API.  This  is possible because the Echo Nest API now supports JSONP requests (in beta, full release coming soon!).  With JSONP  an AJAX app can escape the Javascript sandbox and make calls to 3rd party web services. No need for me to set up a server to proxy calls to the Echo Nest, no Apache or Tomcat, no MySQL,  no worries about scaling.  This makes it incredibly easy for me to host and deploy this app.  I just toss my HTML, Javascript and CSS files into an Amazon S3 bucket, make them world readable, and I’m done.  It really has never been easier to create Music Apps. This whole app is less than 500 lines of javascript, written in a few hours on a  Sunday morning while the rest of the family are still asleep.  It is great to see all of these technologies coming together to make easy to create music apps.

(Be sure to check out the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit . It does all of the the graphical heavy lifting in this app. It’s pretty neat.)