Thursday, May 10, 2007

Goombah Yah...

Goombah just announced that they are now leveraging Napster's freeplay trial to create a listenable recommendation playlist. Basically, here is how it works:


1. Download the client application (available for Windows and Mac)

2. Let Goombah analyze your iTunes library (other media players are not yet supported) - depending on the size of your library it may take up to 20 minutes

3. Once the analysis is done, the application will recommend other Goombah users and songs (presumably using basic collaborative filtering algorithms)

4. The song recommendations come in two flavors... free/promotional tracks that can be played and downloaded directly into iTunes (and into an auto-created "Goombah" playlist) and all other tracks. If you are just selecting a single track, then you are also given the option to deep-link directly to Napster's, Amazon's and iTune's catalogs.

5. The most compelling piece is the integration with Napster at the playlist level. Basically, you can click "play recommendations from members" and it will take your list of 100 recommendations and try to match as many to Napster's catalog as they can. After a few moments, it determines that it found "28 of 100 tracks" (for example) and then launches using Napster's freeplay (pops the Napster dhtml player and starts playing the playlist).

6. And of course like any good "music 2.0" service, all of your listening behaviors are captured to passively program a music profile and community. By the way, I've got a new widget on my sidebar that links to a bunch of my profiles - now including my Goombah profile.

As I've talked about many times, the Napster "freeplay" trial enables users to stream any track in the catalog for free up to 3 times (on the 4th try it rolls back to a 30 second sample). I am a fan of this approach (similar to Fiql's - see my post title "Fiql Revisited" from a couple days ago).

I feel like there should be a "meetings of the families" of all of these cool small music 2.0 companies. If a handful of these guys joined forces, they could really create something with real momentum behind it - not to mention benefit from each other's strengths.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ok, this sounds exactly like iLike?
Are Goombah just ripping them off or do they have something up their sleeve?

jherskowitz said...

The real tangible difference is Goombah's use of Napster's pop-up player to play full tracks as opposed to 30 second samples.