OK, OK, the Web 2.0 mention is probably a little bit gratuitous. But hey these are new services so they have to be Web 2.0, right? So this will be the best review I’ve ever written for a service that I quit using. Just go with me a bit here, ok? It’ll all come together in the end. Really.

There are several new services that popped up (get it pop? pop music? umm…ok, let’s move on) that help you find new music to love based on the music you already love. Techcrunch has done a nice job of detailing these out as they’ve launched and I’ll link back to them for you as well as directly to the services.

Pandora may be the biggest of this new group as Arrington says they are about to announce they now have 1.8 million users. The creators of this site are the same guys that brought you the Music Genome Project. Punch into their site set up some channels and explore your way into some new great music. Maroon 5 is streaming in the background from their site as I type this.

Another contender is Last.fm. Log in, create a playlist of your favorite songs and the service will help you find new music and connect you to other folks with similar tastes.

Or once you’ve signed up for both of these services you can go to Reality’s mashup of the two sites and try to get the best of both worlds (Arrington’s write up on this). Both Pandora and Last.FM work just fine and seem to be growing in popularity.

But after trying these out I ended up liking MusicStrands better(Arrington’s comments here). I liked the interface and the music recommendations they offered seemed to fit me better. Your mileage may vary. But after playing with it a bit I turned off the little helper app that attaches to iTunes to monitor your music listening and help you discover some new music that you might like. The problem for me for all of these sites is that I hardly ever sit down and listen to music from my Mac. I listen from my iPod. At the coomputer desk it sits in its cradle, connected to some nice JBL Creatures II speakers playing music of podcasts in the background without using my PowerBook resources. And surprisingly enough, none of these services work very well if they can’t tell what you’re listening to.

But rather than just uninstall and move on, I sent the folks at MusicStrands a note and told them I’d dumped the app and why. In return I got a very thoughtful note from the folks there thanking me for my note and input. But best of all, they said they understand. Evidently I’m not alone after all. I guess lots of folks listen to their music on their iPods, periodically syncing with iTunes to drop in the new music and podcasts. The really good news? They tell me they are working on adding some capability to a future version that will be able to monitor my iPod music habit when I sync and offer up some music suggestions based on that. Cool.

Kudos for their thoughtful reply and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing that feature. Because as you all know, 6500 songs on my iPod isn’t really enough, is it? Give ‘em a try if you listen from your box or wait with me for the next level…

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Posted by DB in Blogs, Media, Podcasts, iPod