I am enjoying Epic Dance Music, a beta application that draws from SoundCloud searches to create terrific dance playlist stations. Over the weekend I listened to a list riffing off of my initial pick: “Catgroove” by Parov Stelar. This was followed by a Decibel Junkies tune, DJ Trademark’s “Uncontrollable,” MGMT Kids, “BlogsDemodaCE,” Hello’s very amusing “Arrow in the Knee Remix,” and Klayplex, “Lights.”
Epic Dance progenitor Nicholas Abramovic sent us a brief description of the project. “While the website is designed with an EDM [electronic dance music] focus (since there’s a clear lack of discovery in this genre) you can find tons of non-EDM music such as Drake and John Mayer,” Abramovic explained. “Currently we’ve generated over 600k song-specific stations and this list is growing every day.”
In other SoundCloud news: looks like progress is being made on BBCode formatting to embed the SoundCloud music player on PHP/Mysql powered discussion boards. Developer Muhammad Rahman has the announcement up on the vBulletin discussion list. The BBCode formats as so:
[SOUNDCLOUD]https://soundcloud.com/jenniferlopez/jenniferlopezliveitup[/SOUNDCLOUD]
You can take a look at a sample embed here. BTW, I totally agree with what the Dope Music blog says: “Despite the numerous bugs and updates experienced over the past year or so, I personally believe SoundCloud is the best music hosting platform there currently is.” SoundCloud is such a terrific resource—full of unpredictable yet high quality stuff. If you are doing anything interesting with the application, please drop me a line.
Meanwhile Plug.dj (which also lets you search through SoundCloud tunes) has announced a couple of improvements to its community turntable room environment. These include the ability to scan the various room communities that your friends haunt, and listing your favorite communities, too. Now users can “filter” communities based on a variety of criterion: friends, population, favorites. Users “favorite” a community by clicking a star next to it on the list.
“This is just the first of many planned updates to the community list to make it easier to find communities relevant to you,” the blog post says. “Fixing the community search (we know it’s unreliable right now) is something we will be tackling soon, as well.”
Interestingly, over at Cult of Mac they’ve concluded that, despite all its troubles, Last.fm is still the best Internet radio music service, especially since it tapped into YouTube and Spotify. Here’s CoM’s bottom line:
“It was only recently that Last.fm was struggling to keep afloat due to the success of other, better supported services such as Pandora and even Spotify itself, with the abandonment of its service altogether in almost every country except the UK, US and Germany, for which it announced its intentions to put its desktop radio service behind a paywall. However, with this most recent collaboration [Spotify], alongside the YouTube partnership, all Last.fm web users worldwide will not only have access to a vast majority of exclusive and obscure music, but they’ll also have the ability to choose from a vast catalog comprising the two libraries, for both free and premium users.”
Interesting. I haven’t used Last.fm much of late. Maybe I’ll run over there and update myself on the improvements. Next week I’m going to write about YouTube’s oddly charming relationship with AM/FM radio stations.
We cover social music sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.
