Lately i’ve been literally STARVING to find a good new artist within my own personal taste. What better way to “discover” than with Web 2.0. There is a growing number of sites out there that want to recommend music to you, play it for you, test you, learn from you, and then re-recommend based on how you rated past experiences. These sites want to, over time, get to know you better and be the ones that “discover” for you.

The basics behind most of these sites is that you pick your favorite band, and based on what the database has for styles and matches on that band, the site will randomly play related music. You then rate good or bad the recommended songs that it plays for you. This really works well. At the begginning you get quite a bit of music that’s not so good, but after a few thumbs down and thumbs up ratings, the site begins to put Web 2.0 to action.

Techcrunch provided a list of some of the “hot” web 2.0 music sites. They do a great job of summing them up. The article can be seen here.

This is a perfect example of how a web site can “get to know you personally”. It’s web 2.0 at it’s finest, accessing quite a “human” element to something that is very “unhuman”. Are we moving toward what became of the computer “Hal” in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Another Web 2.0 side to the music industry is the new music social networks. Site’s like Mog match you up with other “friends” with common music interests and even goes to the extent of going through your entire offline music collection (ipod, itunes, etc..) to give you a profile for it to work with. It then recommends other friends in the social network, and you can preview their music lists and see if there’s anything new you might like.

Either way, i’m still finding myself at a loss for some great new music. With all these tools out there, you would think I would easily come across something… Maybe there just isn’t anything inspiring out there right now. For now, i’ll just keep searching, Web 2.0 style.