The Recommender

Some people have already called it a ‘Blog Station“, others have labelled it a “Selective Collective“. Both monikers feel about right and kinda suit it, but either way there’s no denying the increasing buzz that has arrived following today’s long-awaited launch of a new music discovery service, called Music Robot.

To explain, Music Robot is a new online music chart, voted for by the public, but based on the artists that the UK’s established music blogs are covering. If one of the 18 taste-maker blogs writes up an artist, then the robot pulls them onto it’s front page and shows it off so the public can vote for it.

Only a finite number of selected music blogs have been hand-picked from the blogging community in the UK. The team behind Music Robot kindly asked The Recommender to get involved as a kind of ‘Blog Consultant’, so the whole site had a ‘made by music blogs, for music blogs’ angle to it’s design and content.

We’ve had the involvement of each blogger From the outset, making sure that their sites are placed right at the heart of Music Robot. We want to hand them traffic, not steal it away, so you cannot read their actual posts, or see every tune by one artist and you cannot download the tracks from the Music Robot site, you will still have to click through to the original blog post for all that. As you scan around the site you will notice that it’s giving you lots of opportunities to locate the blog that delivered it, as this was really important to all involved.

THE BLOGS : A New Band A Day, Abeano, Breaking More Waves, Crack In The Road, Cougar Microbes, Dots & Dashes, Gold Flake Paint, Killing Moon, Lost Lost Lost, Music Fans Mic, My Band’s Better Than Your Band, Not Many Experts, Real Horrorshow, Song By Toad, The Blue Walrus, The Pigeon Post, The Recommender, The Von Pip Musical Express.

It’s about time the UK blog scene had it’s profile raised, so we’re proud to be on board with a project like Music Robot. In this country the traditional music discovery channels, such as print media and radio stations, are still very influential, strong brands, so music bloggers haven’t quite had the profile that our American cousins experience, yet those same traditional channels and the wider music industry have known for years just how exciting and useful music blogs can be. Music Robot gives it the profile-raising hub that it always needed.

But it’s not only about the bloggers, it is of course also about finding great new music. Who knows where it might lead, but the initial reaction suggests we might just have a little bit of the future on our hands here, as the underground goes overground. Spend just five minutes on the site and we promise that you will discover something very new and very awesome. (MB)