A new community driven music discovery service called Goombah has come out of its beta testing phase today and is now live to sign up to.
It’s a free desktop application for both PC and Mac that analyses your iTunes collection and then provides recommendations based on what it considers your tastes are compared with others in the community.
Goombah analyses each user’s iTunes collection and listening behaviour and connects them to people and music that precisely match their taste. Users can sample recommendations and purchase them from various online sources, download free, legal MP3s, and browse entire music libraries of matching members and friends.
Goombah offers a wide variety of free, legal MP3s from established and emerging artists that are targeted to users based on their taste. Users can download these tracks to play on their iPod or other music player and keep them forever. This promotional music is sourced from record labels and third-party distributors, vetted for quality, and updated weekly on “Free Music Fridays.”
Because it’s a desktop application, the service should be able to grow without becoming overloaded because much of the processing power required to find new music recommendations is done on each user’s computer.
Goombah also uses Target Audience Positioning (TAP) which allows labels and artists to reach an audience most likely to be interested in them. Already, more than 30 labels and distributors, including Adrenaline Music, Iris Distribution, Touch and Go/Quarterstick Records and Indie 911 have signed on with Goombah to promote their artists.
On a more general level, the technology is such that it could be extended to other types of media.
Provided you’re OK with your iTunes collection being analysed, this sounds like a really interesting tool that could open up new music that you actually like, that previously you may never have found.
