Nathan wants sites that can help him to discover music for his DJ sets according to his mood. Do you have a music discovery site that you use in this way? Pic: Desktop Nexus
Reader Nathan writes: “So there are a million streaming services out there, seemingly it’s big business. What I want to know is, are aware of a site which you can select music by a mood group? To help clarify let’s use ‘singy’ as an example – the definition of ‘singy’ being those tracks you can’t help but sing along too!
“I basically want to go to a site, enter some basic details like overarching genre (indie or dance), choose a date range for age and other info like this plus my mood group and that’s it.
“Oh and I want to listen to all the good tracks not just the popular ones, I want the lost gems too. Is there anything out there that can do this?
Digital DJ Tips says:
Yes and no, to be honest. I don’t know of any site that can do what you say as you say it, but there are loads of ways of finding music to suit your mood, at least in a similar way to the way you describe.
Many of the music streaming sites have “artist radio” where you enter an artist and it’ll play you music like that – Pandora has majored on that for a long time, and last.fm has a similar feature, to name just two.
Many of the music streaming sites have ‘artist radio’ where you enter an artist and it’ll play you music like that…
One of my absolute favourite ways of discovering music in a certain style is to use a site like 8tracks, where the playlists are compiled by real people, with titles exactly like you suggest: “Female vocalists who have got that somethin’”, “Songs that make you want sing to your hairbrush” etc.
Another method I’m getting a lot of traction out of at the moment is using ShareMyPlaylists to find similar playlists to those I just highlighted from 8tracks, but this time they are Spotify lists. Click one you like and subscribe to it and you’ve got it in Spotify to analyse.
You can then look for similar artists (using Spotify’s own take on “similar artist radio”), look at other playlists compiled by the person who compiled the one that took your fancy in the first place, or just explore further music by any of the artists you like that you discover through doing this – instantly.
I hope these ideas help!
Do you know of any services that offer something similar to what Nathan is asking? Please let us know how you match music and mood by adding your methods in the comments below.
Now go to:
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Tags: dj websites, music discovery, music websites
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Hi Phil and Nathan….
Wow Phil….. there was me thinking you were going to list by far the greatest website ever for either…playing music to get you into a certain mood…..or…to match the mood you are currently in. That website is;
http://www.stereomood.com/
Its so simple….you just type in the mood you feel or activity you are doing, whether it be happy, sad, chillout, relax, studying….and stereomood in seconds creates a playlist to match that. AMAZING!
[ link ]Stereomood – great suggestion!
[ link ]Pandora does for sure. back when I was in high school I use to use yahoo radios “my radio station” a lot I think that was the best and broadened my music collection significantly. since then they discontinued the service now its ran by cbs or some nonsense. ah how I remembered the catchy or awesome unpopular songs that came on and I’d rate it and it would comeback probably later that month if I was lucky. It made me cherish the rarity of some songs
[ link ]Also, one of the under-used functions on Last.FM is their tags system.
Fill in a term, as an easy example “uplifting” and you can get more information on artists/tracks tagged with that tag, or even use their Radio function based on that tag.
The true strength in this lies in the fact that users a free to tag music with their own tags at their leisure. So you basically can get recommendations, even across genres, based on a simple tag!
For instance, check: http://www.last.fm/tag/uplifting
On that page you will also see commonly associated tags, allowing for an even more specific search/”tag cloud”.
The other way around, you can also find more music in the same mindset by using the tagcloud for a specific artist or even a track.
Happy hunting!
[ link ]The label “Ghostly International” has a very nice iPhone app called “Ghostly Discovery” that lets you choose a mood by picking a colour that corresponds to aggressive, frenetic, energetic, neutral, laid back, introspective and sad. It also let’s you set style and speed and then searches it’s catalog for you.
Check it out here;
http://ghostly.com/discovery
Good music too!
Downside, you need an iPhone
All the best!
[ link ]It’s not a website, but I do that on my computer with foobar2000. I tag music with a custom tag. Then it’s just a matter ofmaking an autoplaylist with the mood criteria of your choice.
Last.FM does that in a certain way as someone already pointed out. Best way to expand your musical horizon: Last.FM
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