Idiomag
Idiomag gives you your "own personalised music magazine". Every day, Idiomag will select a few articles related to bands that you are listening to and present them with a very slick flash interface that resembles an interactive magazine that includes images, music, video and text. The content is not your typical music blog stuff (which, quite frankly can be of questionable quality), Idiomag licenses professional content a variety of sources including Losing Today, Sounds XP, and Music Emissions.
How
does Idiomag know what music you like? You just point it at your
last.fm, MyStrands, iLike, or MOG account. They apparently will
suck up your taste data (that sucking sound is the sound of
terms-of-service licenses being violated) and use it to figure out your
musical tastes. If you don't have one of those accounts, no
worries, you can tell it a few bands that you like instead.
Idiomag will make their money by selling ads targeted at their listeners. (I didn't see any ads during my tour of the site).
I
like the slick interface of Idiomag - they've done a very nice job with
that ... but I can't exactly figure out they picked the artists for my
magazine: TV on the Radio, Lavender Diamond and Machine
Head. I haven't listened to these bands in the last week (as far
as I can remember). Idiomag doesn't tell you how they selected
them (in fact they don't tell you very much at all - they don't even
have a privacy or terms of use statement on the site as far as I can
tell). I am extremely curious if they've licensed the taste
data from iLike, mystrands, last.fm or MOG. Idiomag's usage of
this data is clearly commercial - and is probably violating all sorts of
terms-of-use unless they've licensed the data. But I guess that's
the web 2.0 way of things ... build your site, take what data you need
and worry about the terms after you've built a user base. Thanks to Oscar for the tip!
Paul,
I got Machine Head and Lavender Diamond, too (plus Monkey Swallows the Universe -- one band that I actually have listened to recently).
Now we know how compatible our music tastes are according to Last.fm -- not very! So could it be that Idiomag are also taking a cut from record labels, managers etc to promote specific bands, regardless of personalisation? Or is this coincidence just an artefact of early days, which will disappear when the service has more content behind it?
I saw two ads for eMusic.
cheers, David
Posted by David Jennings on August 22, 2007 at 08:16 PM EDT #
Hey guys,
Yes, Paul you are right about the current article selection being "an artefact of early days"... We are building up our base of content rapidly, and any poor article selection is probably attributable to lack of content, rather than failure of the personalisation system.
We have loads more to come over the next month... so keep your eyes peeled ;)
Andrew
Posted by Andrew Davies on August 23, 2007 at 04:59 AM EDT #