One of my favorite pastimes in my early to mid 20’s was pirating music… When I first moved to San Francisco I had some friends who lived in a flat in Lower Haight, the heart of urban gentrification at the time. Every Sunday morning we would congregate in their living room for a lazy day of reading, recovering, talking, and file sharing. It wasn’t all about getting music for free… It was more about having access to a gold mine of music, sampling new sounds with virgin ears, and rediscovering ourselves through a newfound love. All without incurring a permanent cost.
Over the past few years I’ve dropped my piracy habit… mostly because it’s become increasingly difficult (I confess) and also because I do want to reward artists and producers for compositions I enjoy. Friends, TV/movie features, and radio (bleh) have become my primary sources of new music… until now. Thanks to advances in social music, I can once again safely explore uncharted ground.
Pandora is a site I’ve used in the past and while I think it’s incredibly promising, it needs a few key features. For one, they should just scour your music directory to save you the effort of typing in your favorite artists/songs (maybe this is in the works). Also, they’re still working on building out their catalog of music… for example, they have no matches for ‘A.R. Rahman‘ – one of the greatest and most prolific Indian composers of our time. They did, however, recently enable search for user generated stations and I immediately found a couple of stations I love. Unfortunately there seems to be no indication of what song is currently playing… or any way to stop it… obviously still a work in progress.
I tried iJigg.com today for the first time and was pleased to discover that the top (most popular) song listed is “Ya Rabba” from the new hindi film Salaam-E-Ishq. Beautiful song… Although I think this site is supposed to allow artists to upload their own, original music. In any case, this is probably a good site to track.
I’m definitely excited about the prospects of finding new incredible music… I even added a ‘Music’ category so I can share my discoveries with my blahg readers!
Hey Seema,
Thanks for blogging about iJigg. We’re all about getting folks to discover “incredible music” as you put it:) In upcoming updates we’ll continue to make that easier and more fun.
-Zaid
co-founder & ceo
iJIgg.com
gud …dunno if u have already been there ..seen that ..but amoeba music (haight n ashbury) is a physical location (rather then the net) where you can find lots of stuff …new…old…unheard …et al …
-A
a music seeker ….
Thanks for your comment, anil. I’ve been to amoeba many times – great assortment of music. I think the difference with the online tools is that many are trying to recommend music based on your existing preferences… A single superhuman music fanatic could probably do the same in the offline world, but the web-based apps give you access to a world of fanatics. :)
Thank for making this valuable information available to the public.