This looks interesting!
Indy: The Google of Indie Music
By Jon Newton 4/18/05
Thanks to the Net, Indie music has come of age. All musicians need is an online connection, a bit of initiative, a little imagination and they’re cooking. The trouble is, there’s now so much out there, how do you get to hear to it all?
As we write this, we’re listening to Italy’s Cum Distortion —– thanks to Indy, Freenet creator Ian Clarke’s latest brainchild which, he promises, does for freely available independent music what Google does for the world wide web.
Jon Newton
“Over the past few months, while working on Dijjer in public, we’ve been working on a sister project in private called Indy’, and we’re now ready to release it to the public at-large,” he says.
It uses collaborative filtering, similar to that used by Amazon to recommend books, etc, to prospective buyers, to learn about your musical preferences in relation to other Indy users.
Everything it plays is from online indie music freely available on the web and you can rate each piece at between one and five stars. Using that as feedback, Indy will find and download music that’s keyed to what you like as opposed to what you don’t like : )
“Eventually it becomes like your own personal A&R machine,” says Clarke, going on:
“Artists benefit too, since the user can just click on the name of the mp3 and immediately visit their websites to learn more about them, or perhaps buy their CDs or other merchandise.”
