There's never been a better time for music discovery than today.
In my college days, I was on top of all the newest, most obscure music. Those were the post-punk days and while most of SUNY Albany were listening to Bruce or the Dead, I was into the Chameleons, Echo & the Bunnymen, Ultravox, the Style Council the Replacements and more. When Kate Bush's Running Up that Hill got commercial airplay and everyone "discovered" her, I was devastated.
Since graduating college, my music discovery abilities have diminished dramatically, until recently. But today, rather than my informal network, I have a bunch of great tools which I use for music discovery. If I hear something I'd never heard before, I use Shazam to find out what it is. Then I can check out that band on Last.fm to hear some of their other work. For true discovery, I depend upon Pandora and music blogs like the Hype Machine. To find live music from bands I already love, I use Wolfgang's Vault. And I purchase digital downloads, mostly from Amazon.
Of course, two new services have gotten me excited, Spotify and Turntable.fm.
Now, I'd used Spotify heavily whenever I'd traveled to the UK. The ability to listen to whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to, was incredibly compelling. And, contrary to the music industry fears, it often prompted me to buy a digital download from Amazon.
Turntable.fm, on the other hand, is a very compelling social music service. You can start a room or enter someone else's room to find up to 5 DJ's queued up to play music. Participants vote on songs they like/disklike and there's a running chat commentary in the lower right. For those of us who spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours making and sharing mixtapes in college, Turntable.fm is perfect. But most people would rather just listen to music than to program it. I showed Turntable.fm to both my wife and daughter (admittedly a small sample) and neither of them got it. It was too much work and they had no interest in debating music. They just wanted it to play.
That's why I think Spotify and Pandora will win the streaming music market. My 12-year-old daughter likes Pandora and has set up a few channels and is quick to like/dislike a song to drive personalization. My wife runs Pandora on her iPad, though has done limited personalization. While neither of them have yet to install Spotify (they both listen mostly on mobile devices), I've no doubt they will do so in the coming months.
With both Spotify and Pandora, there is no need for the user to do any work. Typical radio listeners will find Pandora a natural fit. Just pick a channel and listen, perhaps adding likes, dislikes and skips. Those who'd more typically play a CD will find that same experience in Spotify. Mixtape creators will find a comfy fit with Spotify, where we can create and share playlists (like this Post-Punk playlist I've created). Of course, streaming music will be a crowded field, and Amazon and Apple will clearly be among the market leaders, but Spotify is a strong contender, with Pandora a likely acquisition target for one of them (Amazon?).
There's probably a niche for Turntable.fm but I don't see it ever getting widespread use. Most people view music listening as a passive experience and won't put in the effort that it requires.
