With more and more music on the market and more and more ways to access it, finding the music you really love – but that you just haven’t heard yet – is becoming a bit like the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Thankfully, music recommendation is a growing industry, as sites such as Last.fm and Pandora have proven. The ability for fans to scrobble whenever and wherever has broadened the reach of Last.fm in a significant way. CBS VP Fred McIntyre states that this year the service, “expect to add another 23 billion scrobbles. Today at peak, we scrobble over 800 tracks per second.”

Looking at the recent partnership of Spotify with Facebook, and mFlow’s launch out of beta, the growing music fan communities are set to open up the avenues of discovery even further.

Discovery is a hurdle that on-demand and streaming sites are all jostling to clear. More and more platforms are vying for social network integration and music communities that align artists and fans through their passions. Which is good news with regards to Spotify and Facebook, because if a playlist feels like a bit too much effort, being able to recommend tracks for your friends and followers is now as easy as synching a profile and/or clicking a button.

The idea might not be revolutionary, but it is allowing our engagement with social networks to become more 3D. Instead of having to write a list of all the bands you love or are listening to, your profile is automatically created from your top played artists and tracks. Although, if there be a few too many skeletons in the closet you can edit the lists, which is in some ways a shame, as I really like the idea of knowing what people are actually listening to all the time.

You don’t even need to specifically recommend anything, just having the option of updating what you are listening to straight to your profile means you’re a veritable DJ without even knowing it.

The Facebook integration is one part of the latest release of features on Spotify and it looks good, if a little sparse, plus it is a fun way to see yourself displayed in terms of current top tracks. It is early days, still I had at least one artist I had never heard of show up on my top 10 listened to list, so their tracking may need a bit of a tweak.

New service mFlow is fresh out of beta and takes the music community to another level. The service is like MySpace on Twitter, only with the music library of iTunes. The exciting twist is that when your friends or followers choose to buy something you recommended, you get a 20% cut. The idea is that the more of your recommended music friends listen to and then buy, the more money you have to buy more of the music you find and love yourself.

According to those I know who have really got into the site; it makes for a truly harmonious community. With artists able to directly target fans and fans able to respond to this by sharing their devotion in a motivated, yet passionate way. I’ve heard it said that, “the first 16p you make for converting a new fan to your favourite artists will feel like the best 16p you ever made”.

Whether a need real or perceived, it appears that BlackBerry are targeting music fans who are feeling the need to communicate more “open and honestly” through their BDM. Though they don’t put any definitions on the type of community they want on BDM, the adverts do feature a lot of live gig going. And they are supporting NME’s new online music community, Breakthrough. A mash-up of BBC Introducing and MySpace, the community allows new bands to connect with fans, and those fans to help spread the word.

Like all trends then, there is often a backlash. Perhaps having to watch your step while you declare undying love or hatred for something – and we all need a good rant from time to time – for fear of the ‘haters’ or the sound of tumbleweeds blowing in the wind, makes one-to-one messaging a breath of fresh air.

How very retro.

All of this signals that the industry is embracing the idea that there are a multitude of consumers and that there needs to be engagement for each segment. It is early days for all models and it will be interesting to see how each of the communities develops.

Marie-Alicia Chang is Co-Founder at music analytics business musicmetric.com

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The Human Recommendation Engine
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