Whyd: Collecting Music On The Internet
By Aarti Kelapure of Evolver.fm.
Another week, another thing for collecting music on the internet that people might or might not want to use. The latest: Whyd, a social music service that lets you find music from free music sources across the web and start a collection of songs on your Whyd profile page — kind of like an expanded, not-as-alluring version of This Is My Jam, or a music-based Pinterest.
Whyd hunts down the music you’re after from places like YouTube and Soundcloud. This means that you can aggregate and share songs you might not be able to find on a service like Spotify, as well as live and rare versions of songs, and music videos. While not common, we have seen this before.
The Paris-based service, which launched this week, requires an invite. Once you’ve been invited and sign in, you’ll automatically be subscribed to several “top users,” as with Tumblr. This is slightly annoying, as with Tumblr, but we get that it showcases Whyd’s social networking component, which generates a stream of songs from people you follow. The sidebar offers suggestions of people to follow and recent activity from people you already follow.
Adding tracks to your own page is simple: Click the “Add Track” button, search for a song or enter a URL, and pick from among the results. You can also install the Whyd bookmarklet to add songs directly from other websites. And whatever you find can be organized into playlists
Is Whyd necessary? Well, that’s up to you. We do love an app with a clean interface and a friendly user experience, and Whyd does not disappoint in that regard. However, we prefer the one-song-at-a-time feature This Is My Jam boasts because it keeps the site’s content fresh and doesn’t overwhelm users with an overflowing stream of music. As for tools for collecting music from all over, that approach isn’t particularly new either.
We could see Whyd being more useful as a bookmarking tool than as a music discovery tool. Having your favorite content from around the web bookmarked on one page sounds pretty convenient, and if you’re looking for a place to curate free music on the web that you can send to your friends, it could be just the ticket.
There really should be a disclaimer here that This Is My Jam is an Echo Nest product and Evolver FM is Echo Nest’s publicity department. It casts this whole “review” in a bad light. It’s like Coke doing a review of Pepsi – do you think they’ll say it’s any good?