Music is important to me. Not because I have any musical talent (at all), or because I work in the music industry (or ever have) or even have friends who are musicians (although I do have a couple). Music is important to me because I listen to it almost every waking hour, and need it to concentrate while I’m working.
According to iTunes, I have just under 6,000 “items” in my music library. That’s 16.5 days of music, playing 24/7. I like to find new music, and have pretty eclectic musical tastes (literally everything from The Corrs to korn appears in my library). I’d like a tool that helps me do a few things:
- Find more music by the artists that I like
- Find new artists that are similar to artists I like
- Find new genres/categories of music to try out
- Download/purchase all this music and add it to my iTunes library quickly and easily
Putting all this together, here’s what I’d like (Lazyweb?):
- An Adobe AIR application (that runs on my Mac)
- Full-screen ability, accessed ideally via the Apple Remote, a la Front Row
- Load my iTunes library (or Last.fm account perhaps) and use the play counts as a starting point for exploring music
- UI something like LivePlasma to start with, allowing me to browse related artists, as determined via the Amazon API.
- Navigate the hierarchy/relation-graph of genres to find new/related genres
- Use a CoverFlow-style UI to flick through the album art of albums within genres, showing artist and title on each album.
- Flip an album to view track listing.
- Preview all tracks available via MP3 right there (add them to a queue and let me keep browsing)
- Enable 1-click purchase of MP3 tracks, automatically adding them to my iTunes account once they are downloaded.
- It’d also be cool if this UI/app could run in a “local” mode, where it just provided a navigation experience on my own music collection, while still pulling in related information from Amazon.
That’s all for now – what do you think? What features would you want in a music exploration service? Do you even collect a local library anymore, or do you rely on services like Pandora to provide your beats? I’m also still waiting for a decent system to manage my media on my laptop + home theatre (Mac Mini).