Idea: Amazon Music Exploration Application

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:

  1. Find more music by the artists that I like
  2. Find new artists that are similar to artists I like
  3. Find new genres/categories of music to try out
  4. 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).