While perusing the Internets today I came upon a website called “finetune“. It’s another “Social Music” website in the growing online-music-space, dedicated to listening to your favorite artist’s music and discover new music that you can buy like the good little consumer that you are. There are many others but I won’t discuss them here. The list is just TOO long. You can see a “small” list in this comment at another website.
On finetune I did some searches for my favorite artists. However, due to the broad range of my musical interests, the website doesn’t have my top picks. Peter Mulvey, Willy Porter, Eddie From Ohio… nada, zilch, bupkus.
While searching for “Peter Mulvey,” I accidently clicked the search item for “Peter“. I’ve never heard of the artist “Peter” but apparently he’s related to some interesting artists. All of which I’ve heard of and some I actually listen to… Weird Al Yankovic (not to be confused with “Weird Al” Yankovic… Don’t these people have algorithms to detect the similarity there? [sigh]). Stewie, Brian… those two being from “Family Guy” I suppose. The last one was weird though. I could see the first three (four [sigh]) being lumped together. But the fifth (fourth, oh jeez, I’m confused. heh.)
Alison Krauss
What kind of list is that? Weird I tell ya. And clicking “more…” to see the additional related artists brings up even more odd choices to be related together…
Black Sabbath
Bowling For Soup
Ella Fitzgerald
Frank Sinatra
Jimi Hendrix
Ummm. WTF. Can anyone tell me what these people have in common, musically? That I might be interested in listening to them if I picked any ONE of them to listen to. The only thing that comes to mind is that THEY ALL PLAY MUSIC. Well, except for Stewie and Brian. but wait, they sing. So… yeah. Everybody is connected to everyone. I’m just surprised they didn’t include the last obvious choice…
Kevin Bacon.
And two more things, coming from my webdeveloper-ness…
- When you tell us what url to use to “directly link” to that page… Make it CLICKABLE!!! Don’t force people to highlight it, copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into the address bar.
- If you DO paste the url into address bar, don’t hijack that link and change the URL to something OTHER than what the user entered. Even if you DO load the page the user requested, you can’t bookmark the actual page the user wanted. You’ll just bookmark the homepage, and if I want to bookmark an artist page, I WANT TO SEE THE ARTIST URL. Don’t assume. Because you know what that does… (cliche over)
Bad form finetune. Good looking website but I’ll be moving along. Pandora is still my online music choice.