Music Aggregators We Love & Some Crowdsourced Goodness

Mari Basson

In the spirit of cool stuff and an approaching weekend, we thought we’d share our team’s favourite music aggregator sites with you. And seeing that the hippest kids are mostly the ones with the hottest and up-to-date music collections - you can thank us for your newly acquired cool status later.

An interesting side note too (and by far our favourite thing) is that these sites all rely on Crowdsourcing and or Wisdom of the Crowds. So here’s an official thank you to everyone out there for our epic playlists.

1. We Are Hunted

We Are Hunted tracks the 99 most popular songs in the world online every day. This is done by measuring song popularity on blogs, forums, Spotify, MySpace, YouTube etc. Interesting to note too is that they don’t even count digital downloads, instead they ‘detect sentiment, expression and advocacy.’ What we love about We Are Hunted is that it doesn’t use any commercial methods, instead it defines cool where the cool really lurks, on our favourite social networking sites. We are Hunted is a great example of how online is changing the face of the music industry – online interaction is becoming more and more superior in defining cool culture. In fact people are relying less on the SONY BMGs and even MTVs of this world - or are these big players becoming more reliant on the crowd to support the decision making process? I reckon it’s a good mix of both.

 2. Taste Kid

If our excitement is anything to go by, this site is sure to get you ridiculously amped! Taste Kid provides recommendations based on what you already like. What we also love about Taste Kid is that it churns up book recommendations, movies and suggested authors. You can integrate Taste Kid with your Facebook account and share the recommendations made directly with your friends on your wall. There’s also a Twitter game which helps followers find the music they’re looking for, and tweeple who can help out get accredited for their knowledge. Epic, indeed.

3. The Hype Machine

Loads of people online blog about music they like – so where does it go? To Hype Machine. Basically Hype Machine lists the top music blogs and keeps all the information on their site. It’s a constant stream of real time activity. You can check out the latest mentions or the most popular searches and you can vote for your favourites by sharing them on Twitter. There’s also a radio feature which broadcasts the past week’s featured music non-stop – all linked to download and share with your friends and or followers instantly. Nice.