Post 24- Musicovery

Although it's pretty impossible to quantify which music suits a given mood or emotion (because what someone will want to listen to whilst in a certain state of mind is entirely subjective), Musicovery is a site with a nice interface that allows you to listen to a host of radio stations matched to 4 distinct moods: Positive, Dark, Energetic and Calm (and the shades of grey in-between).

I think the idea is executed well and you can discern a quite general change in mood of the music when moving the cursor over the grid but, like anything that tries to categorise the mood of music, it is by no means perfect. A case in point is when i scrolled over the bit between 'positive' and 'energetic' and it played Jimi Hendrix's song Manic Depression.

The playful feel of it and ability to seamlessly flit through 117 tracks makes it possible to discover new music but mostly I just end up entertaining myself with it by mashing together death metal and jazz.

This interface is just a single feature of the site however and it does contain a Pandora style 'similar artist radio' but as mentioned before on this blog I don't think these algorithmic recommendation systems are brilliant tools for finding new music.