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I’ve been experimenting with online music recommendation services the last few weeks. Every few years, there’s an upswing in interest in these–the first (that I remember) was FireFly, which was eventually purchased. The idea is to gauge your taste in music from rating songs/albums/artists and compare the ratings with others via collaborative filtering and make suggestions that similar people liked too. In the ideal world, as these services grow larger, they get more accurate–because there are more users like you to draw on and more music/books/whatever to draw recommendations from.

The problem with most of these services (including Amazon’s recommendation system and the links in the iTunes Music Store is that it’s easy to find the highly-recommended (a.k.a. very popular) music. I tried out Audioscrobbler which seems fairly popular and is nicely integrated into the last.fm online radio service with lots of indy music.

But chances are, I already know the popular music–there’s already a huge marketing machine to make me aware of these groups. No, I usually want to know the less-well-known groups, and chances are, these groups don’t have many listeners–and thus people recommending them in the system. So the recommendations I get are usually groups I’ve already heard of and may like–but don’t have in my library.

What I’ve been looking for is some way to find music that only a few similar people have recommended. Enter “Mobster” — currently only a Mac OS X app, semi-integrated with iTunes. Down below, it uses MusicMobs for the recommendation service–MusicMobs itself is OK, but just like all the other recommendation services.

Mobster, on the other hand, is very cool. It adds a slider from “Hipster” to “Mainstream” that filters based on the number of recommendations. So I can fairly quickly run the gamut from highly-hyped to the possibly-next-great-thing that only a few people have heard yet. It also generates links into the iTunes Music Store, so you can try out Apple’s 30-second samples of the music in question.

Cool.

Edited: 2004-11-30 One complaint I have about the MusicMobs server is the seemingly vast amount of semi-duplicate links that come up when you do a search by artist, e.g. for Radiohead. Since some users have entered incorrect data, you see links to artists like “Radiohead ” and “RADIOHEAD”. Let’s not even get into the question of groups with-or-without “The” like the Beatles. I don’t know how much impact this has on recommendations–I don’t see these come up in Mobster or the MusicMobs webpage yet, but it seems like some filtering and/or fuzzy matching might help. Sad to say though that multiple forms of data is probably the most common “bug” for databases everywhere, chemistry and science included.