Hypebot recently shared beta invites for Serendip.me, a music startup that uses Twitter as a music discovery engine. It's gotten great early reviews but I haven't been quite as enthused as others, though that is partly because the people I follow on Twitter don't share much music.
Serendip.me is a music discovery engine that initially uses the music shared by those you follow on Twitter to power your web radio station on Serendip. Apparently they started off using YouTube for music delivery but I'm seeing some SoundCloud tracks as well.
Your initial dj list is based on Twitter but, once you get going, you can drop some of those folks and add others. One of the nicer discovery tools is that when a song is playing, Serendip shows you other people on the service who have also played that song. You can then add them to your list of djs. Serendip says they'll also suggest djs but I guess I haven't used the service enough to get suggestions.
There's also a search option for artists and songs and I found some interesting people via Google though it was a rather haphazard approach I accidentally stumbled upon.
Serendip has a lot of flexibility. You can skip songs you're not interested in or share songs with your Serendip listeners.
Every blog review I've found of Serendip is positive:
- "smartest music integration to Twitter that I've seen"
- "I suspect I’ll still be using it long after this review has posted"
- "it rocks"
I don't have a strong criticism of Serendip but I'm not particularly attracted to it either. I'm not in love with the design but it seems to function as intended. I can understand the appeal in the abstract but I'm just not feeling it.
One problem for me may be that the folks I follow on Twitter aren't posting a lot of music though some of the people I follow post a lot about the music industry. Oddly enough, VC Fred Wilson posts more music than the industry people I follow, but that's not why I follow him!
I guess I'm lukewarm about Serendip, but since others seem to really appreciate it, they may be one of the music services drawing on YouTube and SoundCloud that survives the coming shakeout which seems inevitable given the proliferation of such sites.
Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. He blogs about web business models at Flux Research and the world of dance at All World Dance. To suggest music services and related topics for review at Hypebot, please contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
