Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

Now from the state of Maine is  Goombah ...  yet another music discovery service.  Goombah relies on social data to make music recommendations. Goombah looks at your iTunes music data and finds other simiilar music listeners and makes recommendations for you based on the listening habits of these similar music listeners.  Yet another variation of the 'people who liked XXX also liked YYY.  Goombah makes its money by referring listeners to music sellers like Amazon and iTunes.

It seems like the social discovery space is getting pretty full. There's last.fm, the itunes registery, MusicMobs, MusicStrands, tons of playlist sites, and of course all the big music sites like iTunes and Yahoo that rely on social data to recommend music.  At this point it seems that any social site that is trying to hook listeners up with new music has to find a way to let the listener actually listen to the music, not just give them 30 second samples.   The 30 second samples are far too short for me to decide if I want to buy a song or not.  This is a tough nut to crack with the current music laws. A service has to either own the rights to the music (like Yahoo or iTunes), have a license to stream the audio (like last.fm), or have some otherway of resolving the music to a music service (like MusicMobs).  Without the music I don't think a recommender can be successful.  Goombah says that they'll be offering some music downloads in a few months so perhaps they'll find a way to make it work.