Just discovered a lovely twitter bot, called Recom.me
You send a message using @recomme or direct message recomme with a single artist name and it’ll use The Echo Nest’s Recommend API to trawl through last.fm and various other sources for other artists it thinks you might like.
I tweeted “Hot Chip”, it thought I might like New Young Pony Club, Junior Boys, The Rapture, Datarock, Cut Copy, LCD Soundsystem, Fujiya & Miyagi, Gabby Glaser, Ghosts, Klint, Simian, Acetate Zero & Doleful Lions.
It currently offers links through to find their music at Amazon, eMusic, Google or Echotron, but I imagine the next step will be to link users directly through to the music files itself (perhaps linking with one of these services).
Simple but clever. As all the best ones are.
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Yet, “Tears For Fears” isn’t in their/it’s database….sigh….
Simon, you confused the bot by quoting ‘\”Tears for Fears\”‘. No need to use the quotes. Yeah, it’s a parsing bug to be addressed, but you were over-thinking things. Try: “@recomme tears for fears”… the idea is to make it simple to interact with the bot via SMS. (The name was chosen in part because it was easily key-able with T9 on a phone pad.)
Update: my bad, i put the band name in quotes, and - well - that’s not the way to do it…..later I got a message from recomme telling me so
Just sending Tears For Fears got the sort of response I would have predicted.