Scott Hacker says "Most of the music we hear is handed to us by the recording industry, and that industry treats music exclusively as a business. But amazing people making amazing music are all around us."

"I may be a hopeless idealist, but I believe that great music will bubble to the top on its own merits."

I agree, but I think great music still needs some help in the bubbling up process.

The MP3 artist/listener community needs an “interactive MP3 music recommendation” service to help listeners find music they would like.

I say interactive, because users should be able to seed a music recommendation engine with the names of independent artists they they like. The engine would return music suggestions for listeners to audition and rate.

Successive iterations through the recommendation engine would help it learn, and make better suggestions about what a listener would like to hear.

Users could adopt different “personas” at different times – they could have an “alternative” persona, an “ambient” persona or an “electronica” persona. This respects the idea that music listeners have broad tastes and often have multiple genres of music in their collections. The interactive MP3 music recommendation engine would keep track of each of the user’s personas and build a library of suggested tracks for the user to rate.

By correlating the preferences of many different(anonymous) personas, the recommendation engine would draw on the filtering intelligence of the community to offer a personalized user experience.

For example, my ambient persona “SoundmanMJ” might like stuff like Global Communication, Autechre, and the 2nd Orbital disc but not like stuff by FSOL. I’d like an MP3 interactive music recommendation engine to look for other ambient personas in the database and make music suggestions based on a good persona match.

I guess this idea is somewhat similar to Amazon’s “purchase circles” combined with user recommendation ratings plus their “people who bought X also bought Y” service.

I’d like to see a user driven service where the more I used it, the more valuable it would become to me.

What do you all think?

Michael Joly
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/40/michael_joly.html