We don’t know about you, but whether it’s asking friends, reading music blogs, or surfing music recommendation systems like Pandora or Last.fm, we’re always on the search for new music.
Today, one of the founders of Twones – a service we called a “Delicious for streaming music” – is launching a new music discovery service called Shuffler that we’ll be adding to our list of music recommendation services.
The service is part StumbleUpon for music blogs and part Pandora, helping users to not only discover new music, but also new music blogs that they can continue to frequent in their unending search for music. The service streams music without requiring you to do any more than pick the genre, but also takes you to the originating music blog, which means you automatically get a bit more information.
Shuffler is dead simple, with persistent controls at the top of the browser window that allow the user to skip songs, go back to previous songs, and change genres. If you like the song and want to share it, the toolbar offers quick controls to share the page via Twitter, Facebook and good ol’ email.
The best part of Shuffler might be the instant added value of being escorted around the Web, taken from music blog to music blog, rather than simply fed a stream of music. While services like Pandora offer quick bios and links to find out more about the band you’re listening too, we like being taken directly to a blog that not only covers the band and song we’re listening to, but can likely lead us to more in that genre.
The services gets music by aggregating music from around the Web by genre, scouring a “(more or less) curated list of blogs” and adding them in order of post time “so you will always get the freshest new hip song first”.
Founded by Tim Heineke of Twones and Tone.fm, the service goes live today and accepts submissions from bloggers to have their blog included on the master list. Heineke says there are many additional features in the pipeline, one of which may be “a shuffle (like stumble) button” and hopefully a way for user submissions. For now, Shuffler is launching in Alpha and seeing where things go from there.
