Many of us here at the INDY are music nerds. I thought I would compile a list of some of my favorite online sites, for and by music nerds.
For the data enthusiasts
1. Last FM – https://www.last.fm
This list would be incomplete without mention of Last FM. This site is like Spotify Wrapped on steroids. It provides infinite listening history, custom time-based listening reports, and even the ability to follow friends. Last FM also gives personalized recommendations for artists, albums, and songs! I first started listening to the artist Acetone through the site’s rec.
2. iTunes Artwork Finder – https://bendodson.com/projects/itunes-artwork-finder/index.html
Some guy on the internet made a website that scrapes high-resolution album artwork straight from iTunes. Whether for prints, art inspiration, or copy-and-paste purposes, this is the go-to site for hi-res album art.
3. Receiptify – https://receiptify.herokuapp.com
You’ve likely used Receiptify before. It gained popularity on Instagram stories by aesthetically aggregating a user’s top songs of the month onto an image resembling a grocery store receipt. The out-of-context format makes the site fun.
4. Chart My Music – https://www.chartmymusic.com
Chart My Music takes your Last FM or Spotify listening history to compile a collage of your top albums. It even allows you to customize the sorting basis—by color, brightness, or playcount—and time period.
5. Organize Your Music – http://organizeyourmusic.playlistmachinery.com/#
Organize Your Music lets you “slice and dice your music collection” by a wide range of properties: genre, year, danceability, valence, or any of a couple dozen properties you can select.
6. Obscurify Music – https://www.obscurifymusic.com/login#!/
Obscurify Music compares your listening history with others to tell you how “obscure” it is. If you want to gloat to your friends how “indie” and “niche” your music taste is by using quantitative statistics, you should try this out.
For the explorers
7. Drive & Listen – https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com
Drive & Listen is one of my favorites on this list. It allows you to select from a list of dozens of international cities and listen to their local radio station while being taken for a drive in the city’s streets. While it is not actually live, and you may not like driving, it’s still an engaging way to simulate exploring a new place.
8. Musicmap – https://musicmap.info
Musicmap maps the “Genealogy and History of Popular Music Genres” in an impressive, color-coded online interface. It details the complex web of music genre history using styled connections and nodes to mark distinct genres. It’s a wiki too, with each subgenre having its own entry.
9. Every Noise at Once – https://everynoise.com
Like Musicmap, this site lets you listen live to a genre you’ve probably never heard of before. You can listen to the genres schrammelmusik, Japanese concert band, vintage Finnish jazz, and thousands more. While it appears to be a brain-dump of a user interface, the site is a “long-running attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space,” based on Spotify data of 6,291 “genre-shaped distinctions.” In general, a genre’s location on the page indicates its characteristics: down is more “organic,” up is more “mechanical and electric,” left is “denser and more atmospheric,” and right is “spikier and bouncier.”
10. Radiooooo – https://radiooooo.com/#_=_
Radiooooo is perhaps one of the coolest sites on this list. It allows you to sample music from nearly any country in the globe for every decade since 1900 (and even into the future!), all within an interactive map.
11. Boil the Frog – http://boilthefrog.playlistmachinery.com/index.html
Boil the Frog uses data beyond my understanding to “create a (nearly) seamless playlist between (almost) any two artists.” You could start with Bob Dylan and end with Bad Bunny, and the site will generate a playlist joining the two—with the first track being a Bob Dylan song and the last being Bad Bunny. (It took the algorithm 15 tracks to work this combination.)
12. Music-Map – https://www.music-map.com
With Music-Map, you can type in any artist's name, and the website will generate a map of similar ones. It will place the artist you searched in the center and create a weblike arrangement, with artists closer to the center being more similar, and those farther away less similar.
Ted Bergman is a sophomore in the College studying anthropology and political economy and is a Commentary Editor at The Georgetown Independent.
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