StumbleAudio – Discover and Share Great Music

I’m always on the lookout for new music to inspire my guitar playing.  It’s also nice to hear something fresh now and again, but how do you sort out the wheat from the chaff – especially when services such as iTunes puts millions of songs at your fingertips?

Enter StumbleAudio, a streaming service designed to help listeners discover new music, rather than find their old favorites.  The concept is simple – you choose a song or band that you already like, and it comes up with a playlist of song suggestions.  The songs play in their entirety and you can rate them with thumbs up or thumbs down buttons, allowing them to come up with more recommendations based on your preferences.  At any time you can also skip or “stumble” on to the next song.

From their about page:

Our catalog has over 2,000,000 tracks by over 120,000 artists ready to be played in full length, high quality, free of charge.StumbleAudio started to build its recommendation engine by importing massive anonymous data of saved favorites, music preferences and buying patterns from several online download and actual music CD stores. As you use StumbleAudio the system learns from your “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” and constantly adjusts the music offered to your liking.

I gave it a go, putting in “Hillsong” in the search box and it came up with 87 albums that “sound like” it.  The album recommendations themselves looked pretty good, but I must admit that I had to “stumble” my way through six or seven “weird” sounding songs before I found one that I liked.  I suppose though that the longer you use it, the better it should get with its suggestions.  I also liked how when it brings up a song, there are buttons to cycle through the songs on the same album – so you can decide whether it was a one hit wonder or if the artist or album is actually worth checking out.

If you find a song or album that you absolutely must have – there are links to purchase the music from iTunes, Amazon and various other music services.  Another nice thing is that artists do get paid when their songs are played on StumbleAudio – not sure how much, but kudos anyway for thinking of the people who actually work for their money.

For more information, visit www.stumbleaudio.com.