Nothing beats a good recommendation for a new band to listen to, but a recommendation for a new music blog to read can be a gift that keeps on giving. Extension.fm, a New York startup that provides a browser plug-in that captures all the MP3 files you come across and turns them into a playlist, has just announced the creation of a new experimental Labs department.
First entry into Extension’s Labs is something the company calls The Super Awesome Music Blog Finder Thingy ™. Enter your Last.fm username and it will recommend new music blogs that have posted music from artists you’ve listened to the most over the last 30 days. It’s not great, yet, but it could make a pretty great feature once more fully baked.
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If you haven’t scrobbled (ouch) anything with your Last.fm account in the last 30 days, this won’t do much for you. I’ve been fortunate enough to be testing Spotify for the past few months, and just started using the Spotibot recommendation service, so few other music services have moved me. But three cheers for innovation in music recommendation! In this case, Extension is using the EchoNest API, which is hot.
Unfortunately, the recommendations include too many low-quality spammy blogs, blogs that link to torrents (a little less easy to listen to) and generally need some refinement.
Extension.fm was founded by Dan Kantor, the creator of AOL-acquired Streampad and the feature in Yahoo’s Delicious that renders links to MP3 files playable, and invested in this Spring by Spark Capital, Betaworks, Founder Collective (Caterina Fake, Chris Dixon and others) and Dave Morgan (founder of Tacoda and Real Media).
In other words, chances are good that something interesting is going to happen over there. If that includes recommendations based on data acquired from services all around the web and stored in a central repository, that’s cool.
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