last.fm
I just discovered last.fm and it very well may have changed my life. Imagine... having a profile of your favorite music. That's not so unbelievable. Now imagine that there are lots of these profiles, each one representing the musical tastes of another person. Again, pretty easy to do. Every time you (or whoever) listens to a song (in any music player, like iTunes, Amarok, Winamp) the fact that you listened to that particular song is added to your profile. Over time, this profile would become a relatively accurate representation of your musical taste. This is getting pretty good but still well within the realm of the reasonable. Here's where it gets crazy. The software associated with your profile doesn't just index what you listen to, it creates a complete picture of your musical taste, combines and cross-references that picture with everybody elses pictures and can figure out songs that you don't have and may have never heard of that you'll like. I just started using it and it's amazing accurate. Within 5 minutes it had a list of artists for me. Four of them I'd heard of a liked and I'm listening to one of the others now and he's good. I encourage everybody to use this.