ILikeBSides.com - Online Music Recommendations

Something that was displaced by digital music was the old process that meant you went to your favorite store and talked to the clerk about the albums you last purchased, the songs you liked from those albums and the gigs you were planning to attend. In actuality, not all of these aspects have become lost – rather, they have been replaced by new channels for doing exactly so. This site exemplifies that web-based music recommendation systems can be as effective or more than a face-to-face.

Broadly speaking, I Like B-sides enables you to upload the metadata from your iTunes library and based on your current tastes the site will produce a list of songs from these very artists that you don’t have yet, and that might suit you just fine. Mix-tapes with up to sixteen new songs can then be created.

In the first paragraph I enumerated a series of traditions that have been replaced by others in the world of digital music. Still, there is one that we will have a hard time trying to conjure up online: haggling. You can’t get into the iTunes store and bargain half an hour in order to get a discount. You can’t also ask the seller about his family or how is his band doing. That is a price we have to pay… for the time being. Let’s see how things evolve. We might be in for a few surprises.

“If your music library feels a bit “stale”, we can help. This site will build you an unlimited number of mix-tapes (of up to 16-songs each) with plenty of fresh music you should be interested in based on your current choices.”

Those who are looking into ways of revitalizing their music collections can do so through such a website.

Is this service provided at a certain cost, or is it available for free?