emusic.com now has user created album lists. I’m a huge fan of emusic (all of the unencumbered 128kb mp3s you can download for $15 or $10 per month!), but the one drawback to the system has been the lack of community features that make the process of finding new music easier and more fun. They have staff reviews of some of the albums, and a few genre based discussion boards, but that’s been it. It’s very hard to browse for music with no information about what other folks like. Where are the user reviews and ratings? Where are the ‘People who like this album/artist also like this album/artist’ links? These are the key features that make the process of finding music a fun experience rather than a frustrating chore (and keep them coming back to the site and paying the subscription!). None of these features is particularly hard to implement (a summer intern could add user reviews in a couple of months, for instance), so I’ve always been puzzled about why they aren’t there.
They seem to have made a first step in the right direction recently, however, by adding user album lists. Any user can make a list of related / interesting / whatever albums, including a small note with each album. When looking at a given album, you see what lists that album is on and therefore, only a click away, what other albums folks associate with the one you are browsing. This is a great feature, and led me to download about 8 new albums yesterday for the first time in a month or so.
Let’s hope emusic.com keep moving in this direction. I desperately want emusic.com to succeed. Its financial success could solve a huge number of the fights over the future of the music industry, since it would show that there need not be a conflict between commercial and consumer interests.