While on one of my nighttime crusades for the better webapplication (AKA Web2.0 site) I stumbled upon Musicstrands. Ofcourse still in beta just like the other 99.9% of the nextgen Webapplications, this site looked quite finished for still being in early development stage. They aroused my curiosity and i hit the “Sign Up” link, positioned correctly in the topright corner and highlighted in red.
I went on and completed all the fields but accidentaly hit the enter button while still typing in my email. Ofcourse the site bumped me back to the same screen and displayed a nice message in Red that i didn’t complete all required fields but to my astonishment the site language suddenly seemed to be Spanish? Since i don’t know a word spanish i just returned to the homepage, looked for a language button, found in at the very bottom of the site (D’oh!) and went back to successfully complete my registration.
Musicstrands is a nice webapplication, it allows you to share, manage and explore you favourite music genres, playlists and artists. The idea behind it is great. Although i think some features are a little overkill. Don’t get me wrong, the MyStrands plugin for iTunes and Mediaplayer is great, there aren’t many websites who offer their own desktop applications along with their website. As is the wishlist, the ability to form usergroups, arrange playlists, upload photo’s. You can even start your own blog on musicstrands. This is a feature more and more websites are integrating. StockExchange (www.sxc.hu) recently added blogs to their functionality too.
If you find an artist or song you like you get served direct links to online shops offering the album or single tracks. This is based on your location, overhere in Belgium for example, I got redirected to discoweb, amazon or Fnac. All of them shops who deliver CD’s at your door or offer them for paid download. The only drawback is that they redirected me to the spanish sites of discoweb and fnac, and unfortunatly i don’t speak spanish. Result: one less CD sold. But they are forgiven, it’s still a beta.
One feature i’m missing is the ability to suggest artists. There are millions of artists around the globe and personally i found that many of my favourite artists weren’t listed on the site: dEUS, Absynthe Minded, Admiral Freebee, Zornik, Soulwax, Two, etc to name a few. Next to that the majority of artists are american but i guess that’s something we europeans will have to get used to since almost all web2.0 applications focus on the american market. That brings us back to my favourite artists, from which the majority is based in europe. Musicstrands does have offices in Spain but the european musicscene still has a long way to go on Musicstrands.
I was excited to start using musicstrands at first, but after half a day of browsing, adding, recommending and creating playlists i couldn’t say i found new artists to my liking. An option that would allow us to suggest new artists or just add your own favourite artists would help alot, but maybe that’s something for Musicstrands when they get out of beta. Overall Musicstrands offers great functionality combined with loads of content on some musicgenre’s and some great way of recommending music (although i wonder how on heavens earth i got a recommendation for Prince??).
