One Llama Spits in Your Face

Found, via Mashable: a new music discovery site called OneLlama.

OneLlama lets you discover new music based on music you like, much like Pandora or Last.fm, but shows you the results visually in a tree format reminiscent of The Brain. It's very satisfying -- and cool -- to see the song suggestions branching from one to another, and any song that captures your fancy can be added to a playlist. OneLlama uses "“proprietary acoustic analysis, cultural analysis and trainable machine learning algorithms" to determine which songs lead to other songs, and based on my experience, it does a good job.

There is one big drawback, however. Unlike Last.fm and Pandora, OneLlama only offers consumers previews, not entire songs. Apparently, OneLlama has a different business model in mind. According to Mashable:

"You’d imagine that with the right licenses, they could use the tech (it’s very good) to serve up a convincing rival to music recommendation sites. Instead, they’re going a different route: today, they’re announcing a deal with APM (a joint venture of EMI Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing), to develop a software solution for “advanced music searches and automated classifications”. Those navigating the EMI and APM catalogs, then (mainly producers of film, tv, videogames, promos and commercials - not you and me), will have a much easier time finding appropriate tracks to accompany their visuals."

Too bad. The technology and the interface are definitely contenders. Perhaps that will be their Phase II.