PORTLAND,
Maine (Top40 Charts/ Emergent Music) - Emergent Music, developer of the Goombah music recommendation and social networking community, today introduced user-controlled radio delivery of its taste-targeted music. Through integration with Napster's advertising-supported, web-based music streaming service, Goombah members can now listen to full-length tracks of recommendations in one long stream, for free. Members can also listen to the music in other members' libraries by queuing up hundreds of tracks at a time.
"We're very excited to have Goombah as a new channel partner," said David Chun, senior director of product management at Napster. "Combining Goombah's recommendations of long streams of taste-targeted music with Napster's full-length track listening experience provides a high-value experience to music fans that adds a great deal of relevance to both services."
With targeted up-front recommendations, web radio goes from a trickle to a torrent as Goombah users start off with sets of 100 tracks, based on their entire library, playlist or any defined list, which are drawn from the music libraries of matching members. Goombah users can view their recommendations by rank, artist, genre or "adventurousness" level and then select all or part of the list to create a radio-like stream of personalized music. A playlist of all of those tracks that are available in Napster's vast library will then queue and play for free. If Goombah users want to buy a track, they can do so through Napster or any digital music store of their preference.
"This collaboration creates perfect personalized radio stations that both suggest music the user will like and give the user control over what is actually played. It also enhances the browsing experience as users can play music they find on other member profiles," said Diane Sammer, CEO of Emergent Music. "Internet radio is one of the ways that consumers prefer to listen to music and we are pleased to provide this new kind of radio experience for our users."
How Goombah Works
Goombah analyzes each user's iTunes collection and listening behavior and connects them to people and music that precisely match their taste. Users can sample recommendations and purchase them from various online sources. Goombah also offers personalized downloads of free, legal MP3s, and the ability to browse and play entire music libraries of matching members and friends.
The service's Radio Free Goombah makes Internet radio a vehicle for personal expression by allowing users to develop their own radio playlists or use Goombah-created playlists. The radio players contain music from Goombah's Free Music collection so users can "keep" tracks to play anywhere as they listen. Players can be shared via a widget or email.
Goombah also leverages the power of community by providing an easy way for users to explore the music and profiles of people with similar taste. Goombah displays the top 20 people with the most similar musical taste for each user as a starting point for exploration. Goombah displays all the artists that members hold in common, and allows them to browse and listen to each other's entire libraries. Member profiles include each member's Top Artists, Favorite Tracks and Top Goombah Downloads, and members can add bios, rant/rave about music, point to their blogs, websites or MySpace/Facebook profiles and communicate directly with each other.
