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

Adam points me to Musicovery a music discovery tool similar to MusicPlasma that lets you explore a music similarity space in a way very similar to MusicPlasma, but with the added feature that you can actually listen to music.  The similarity to MusicPlasma is not a coincidence, both were developed by  Frederic Vavrille. 




The music similarity model seems to be based on a 2D mood scale similar to the Thayer mood model.  

Musicovery is a pretty compelling music discovery tool.  It is the only interactive tool that allows you to listen to music (sites like last.fm and Pandora give you a linear, one-song-at-a-time experience due to internet streaming licensing requirements).  I'm not sure how Musicovery is licensing their music to allow interactive play like this, but it is a clear improvement over the Pandora/Last.fm style. I hope we'll see more sites like this.

There's absolutely no supporting documentation on the site so it is hard to tell how things work, how their similarity is determined (automatically, socially or by human editors), nor is it clear how deep the music catalog (although there seems to be  a wide range of genres covered).

I was never a fan of MusicPlasma, I though it was slow, the similarity was trivial and you couldn't listen to the music.  Now Musicovery has addressed all of these issues giving us a compelling music discovery tool that is fast, uses an interesting notion of similarity and  most important of all, lets you listen and interact with the music.  5 stars!