Jango: New Player on the Social Music Scene
Social music services are a new, interesting way to find and listen to music. A new service called jango is now in a closed beta. Many people are already aware of social music services such as last.fm and Pandora. The idea behind such services is that they play music based on the user’s input into what he or she likes. They provide recommendations into similar artists based on what other people who like that artist like. Generally, the more you listen to the provided station, the better it gets, as it more closely matches your tastes with those of others.
I spent some time working with jango, and I was very impressed by the interface, the music recommendations, and pretty much everything else about the site. The site uses a large amount of Ajax, making it easy to navigate around the social areas of the site without ever stopping the music. This can be done easily without needing to have open the player in a pop-up window. The social parts of the site made it easy to find and play other people’s stations and to connect with people who have musical interests similar to yours.
The ability to edit stations offered an amount of control over your stations. You can easily add artists and rate songs. The system will ever recommend artists similar to those already added to your stations.
In my opinion, last.fm beats Pandora on social networking aspects, while Pandora beats last.fm on the music recommendations and control over stations. Using jango, it beat both of them across the board. Considering it’s still in a early beta, I can’t wait to see what features get released before it’s ready for the general public.
If you want to try out jango, leave me a comment saying so and I’ll email you an invite to the beta. I’ve only got three at the moment, so it’ll be first come, first served.
Powered by ScribeFire.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!