Business

Shuffler Channels Blogosphere into Simple Music Stations

We know — you’re not exactly hurting for new ways to listen to music right now. Nonetheless, an upcoming service called Shuffler will try to win you over next Tuesday when it will offer an easy way to distill thousands of music blogs into simple music stations. We took a sneak pre-launch peek at this […]

We know -- you're not exactly hurting for new ways to listen to music right now.

Nonetheless, an upcoming service called Shuffler will try to win you over next Tuesday when it will offer an easy way to distill thousands of music blogs into simple music stations.

We took a sneak pre-launch peek at this lightweight, crowdsourced music service, and found a lot to like. Plenty of other tools also scrape music blogs and turn them into de facto music services -- Hype Machine and We Are Hunted among them -- but Shufflr takes a different tack by presenting the music on blogs through a simple "lean back" streaming radio service, with channels represented only by genre.

This makes it dead simple to just hit the play button and go about your business, as one would with an old-school radio, but with the most new-school music -- whatever some music blogger, somewhere, has seen fit to discuss. And each channel plays the most-recently-posted songs first, so you get the freshest stuff up front.

In addition to keeping the channels current and the programming relevant, this technique does blogs and listeners a service by presenting the entire post from where the song came below persistent playback controls at the top of the screen that let you pause, fast-forward, rewind, or switch stations as needed.

Most other music blog scrapers make the blogs nearly invisible, gathering only their music and leaving all of that carefully (or not-so-carefully) written, relevant content to languish on the vine. Shuffler co-founder Tim Heineke describes the system, which uses Last.fm's API to assign genres to songs, as "Pandora for music blogs" or "Stumbleupon for music."

You can ignore these blogs if you want and preserve the "lean back" aspect of the Shuffler listening experience. But if something strikes your fancy, the web-based player makes it easy to tab back to the playback window to read up on a particular band.

Heineke, who also developed Twones, told Wired.com that in addition to the 1600 or so music blogs that the system currently canvasses, he plans to add SoundCloud, YouTube and Vimeo as music sources.

Shuffler will be free to use for up to 20 songs per channel per month, and the company plans to advertise certain blogs or bands in order to support the free version. A one-time fee of $9 removes the 20-song-per-channel-per-month limit.

But the version of Shuffler Heineke is most excited about is its upcoming "cool, minimal" iPad app, which he described as "Flipboard for music." And he's right, the iPad's form factor is perfectly suited to listening to music as one reads up on the artists who made it. He plans to release Shuffler as a paid app within the iTunes store.

Music blogs are a tremendously valuable musical resource, but there are just so darn many of them. When Shuffler launches out of private alpha next Tuesday as a web app, it will offer a simple way to take them in without them taking up all of your time.

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