One of the most ambitious of these services, dubbed Soundflavor, is launching on Thursday. The service, produced by a company called Siren Systems, promises to deconstruct songs into more than 700 component parts and then make music recommendations based on how listeners' tastes match these musical elements.
Soundflavor and other rival services heading for market are part of a longstanding attempt to use technological tools to take over where friends' recommendations, reviewers or other traditional tastemakers leave off. The amount of information online now far exceeds anybody's ability to wade through all of it, but computers can be tapped to lead people to what might otherwise be undiscovered content, these technologists reason.
"Right now, the digital music market is like a big haystack being dumped over your head," Siren president Pete Budlong said. "A recommendation engine with good relevancy is like a strong magnet; you can pull a needle to the surface."
While still very far from perfect -- and sure to face the continuing skepticism of listeners loath to believe that computers can perform the subjective task of recommending music -- the new tools could be an important part of driving demand for digital music on sprawling services like Apple Computer's iTunes, analysts say.
"There's a lot of interesting potential here," said Michael McGuire, an analyst with GartnerG2, a division of the Gartner research firm. "It's going to be crucial for online music in general to have this kind of third party that stands outside the music services and outside the record labels, providing that kind of search."
