Summer is looming and no doubt we will all soon again be inundated with presents we didn’t actually want. As soon as the turkey and mince pies are finished, it will be off to join the Boxing Day queues for many of us, receipts clutched tightly in our hands.

Online shopping has made this time of year much easier to bear, but anything bought online will present its own unique set of challenges. I shall most likely fail in any attempts to return music to iTunes, while getting a refund from Amazon because the ‘customer who bought this item also bought’ just seems far more trouble than it is actually worth.

But it does highlight the increasing challenges we face when choosing our digital music. Just what help is out there? It is represented like Learn How To Hack and Web design & search marketing service UK

A wealth of choice

Social media is a huge growth area, and has been for a number of years, especially where music is concerned. MySpace is a phenomenally popular network, with over 50 million users. Social recommendation systems—the filtering of data to present likely items of interest—now attract a massive amount of attention, with the likes of Last.fm, iTunes, and even Amazon promising to automatically find us new music we will love.

While there is some interesting work being done with these tools, I would argue that the concept of these sites is ultimately flawed, for one key reason. I don’t want to find music that is “similar” or “related to” what I’m currently listening to. I want to find new music I didn’t know I was looking for!

We are in danger of losing sight of one of the great pleasures of new music: Finding that album you had no idea you’d like, that hidden gem, that classic on a friend’s shelf somewhere that you could never “get”, but will eventually be burned into your iPod screen for ever more.

I don’t want to find a new artist that a thousand people who are just like me may think I’d like. A thousand people like me?—I can’t think of many decisions I’d trust them with. And I certainly don’t want to listen to a new track because some robot has computed it’s my kind of thing. Playlists from the Matrix? No thank you.

So what do these services actually offer us? How do they help me find that big new band or great new album?