A cleverly coded website can be a great aid in keeping up with the hottest music online, writes Chris Salmon
In May, we wrote about the excellent BBCify website, which creates Spotify playlists based on the output of BBC radio shows. The man behind the site, Richard Ablewhite, has actually now changed its name to BRITify.com, and that's not all he's been busy with. Ablewhite has also created Biblify.com, which trawls the web for album reviews from various publications (including the Guardian), then gives an aggregate review score alongside a Spotify link. Biblify isn't as slick as the similar Pitchify.com, but gets bonus marks for its Mercury awards minisite, which offers links, reviews and playlists for all the artists ever nominated. Ablewhite has also created the ingenious Lastify (britify.com/lastify) which conjures a Spotify playlist of music recommendations based on your last.fm listening habits. As the site says, "It's like iTunes Genius, but less smug."
Another site using clever coding to help you discover new music is music blog aggregator the Hype Machine. The site has just launched its Fast Forward feature (hypem.com/fast-forward), which allows you to skip through recently blogged music by popularity or genre, seeing a screenshot of the blog post and hearing a sample of the track. If you're not keen on a song, click to move on. If you like it, click the heart to remember what it was. Hype Machine openly admits to being inspired by the wonderful Shuffler.fm, which works on a similar premise. The main difference is that the Hype Machine's Popular chart has long been used as an industry barometer of what music bloggers are excited about, so Fast Forward offers a speedy way to keep up with the very hottest music online. The only pity is that, even if you like a track, the Fast Forward clip is limited to just 30 seconds (though you can click to hear more).
The debut mixtape from Pablo Dylan appeared online last week, at bit.ly/pablomix. The 15-year-old rapper is the grandson of Bob Dylan, a man Pablo considers to be "the Jay-Z of his time". Pablo, meanwhile, is clearly hoping to become the Eminem of his, with the free mixtape's eight tracks clearly owing a debt to the poppier, less aggressive end of Marshall Mathers's catalogue. In truth, Pablo has yet to develop the lyrical dexterity of either his grandfather or his hero – "Everybody put your hands in the air/ If you're feeling like I'm feeling, baby stand on a chair" is a typical line – but his rapping is sharp and his tunes are hooky. Dylan Senior, we're told, "feels strongly" about Pablo's music. But probably not enough, you'd imagine, to offer him a guest MC spot just yet.
Send your favourite links to chris.salmon@guardian.co.uk
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jul/27/biblify-pablo-dylan
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