If you’ve given up on MTV as a resource for actual music and not just reality television trash, you may not have noticed that they’ve launched a new online music discovery website called “MTV Music Meter.” The site lists out the daily top 100 trending musical artists on the internet. According to the site, the data is referenced from a combination of tweets, “social mentions, blog posts, news articles, streams, and purchases for over one million artists.”

The top 100 list is organized into groups of 10 artists. Users can click on an artist to view a bio, tweets referencing the group (this feature is very hit or miss due the fact that it is merely searching Twitter for the name of the artist and commonly-named artists get lost in the volume of tweets), photos and related news. The default in the pull-down menu is a sample of music by the artist streamed via Rhapsody.

Audio samples for Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey

I browsed through the artists listed on the first two pages (top 20) and quickly became bored. Quite honestly, I was really a thrilled with any of the music. I decided to test out the search feature to see what the format for displaying queries was like (and to see if their catalog included any of my more “obscure” musical interests).

Typing in the beginning of the artist’s name in the search field will start a primary search that should yield a pull-down menu with your desired artist listed. The first artist I tried was the quirky/avante-garde group Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey. You can see the results that followed:

Search results for Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey

I happen to have music by all 10 of the artists that came up in the search results. While I wasn’t surprised to see artists like Medeski Martin and Wood, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones and even John Scofield listed, I wouldn’t associated many of the others with JFJO. Sadly, there isn’t a “page 2″ of results. What you see is what you get. If you want to dig deeper, you have to click on one of the artists and find other similar artists. I was also disappointed to see that the Flecktones were listed twice (thusly using up one of the 10 slots for similar artists) because of an alternate listing.

Next I tried to stump the Music Meter with the indie-jazz group, Heernt. I was impressed to see that it pulled up the group and referenced a bio from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons License. The images used for the group were unrelated, stock large-scale concert photos. While the listing of similar artists included John Scofield and Pat Metheny listed 4 different ways (one of them spelling Metheny’s name incorrectly), there were five artists that I’d never heard of before! This is generally a positive result when one aims to discover new music.

I followed the “Similar” link below the group Flanger and found that Jaga Jazzist, a group I had just recently discovered (and listed on my Music Monday Playlist), was among the 10 similar artists. It’s nice to come across recent discoveries when you’re searching for new music because it tends to encourage more digging into the musical rabbit hole.

VERDICT
I wasn’t very impressed with Music Meter at first, but a bit of digging convinced me that this may serve as another possible avenue for discovering new music. Though the service is still in it’s Beta version, it’s free and doesn’t require any form of login or verification to use. While I’m not really a fan of the top 100 so far (which is the main feature- being a “buzz” populated chart), the search tool is somewhat functional. If you’re looking for a new way to find music, check this out. As for the eMpTyV network, I wouldn’t waste my time; they’re still pushing the junky reality TV thing.

1. “Bananfluer overalt” – Jaga Jazzist
2. “Dayvan Cowboy” – Boards of Canada
3. “Ten-Day Interval” – Tortoise
4. “Pi ~ 3.2425″ – Heernt
5. “Goldwrap” – Esbjorn Svensson Trio
6. “Insensitive” – Eldar Djangirov
7. “Between Us And Them” – Ulrich Schnauss
8. “Million Faces” – Contemporary Noise Quintet

Check them out! If you’ve ever listened to any of these artists, kudos to you. Comment with what you’ve heard from them. Extra points of you tweet about this post/blog! See the links below.

Some of you may know me personally. Many of you won’t have any idea who I am. Regardless, I’m glad you’re here!

During 2010 I blogged a photo for every day of the year. Yes, 365 photos. It was a challenging but fun project. This year, I’m starting a blog about music. Expect to find everything from concert photos and reviews to playlists, music technology articles to music philosophy articles. There will be something for everyone. I guarantee you’ll find something new and interesting here. Please subscribe to the RSS feed in whatever reader you prefer (I like Google Reader) in order to keep up with the latest posts.