Did you ever think about starting your own music blog, a music page on the net? Do you have a playful, refined taste in music that you want to share with the world? If so, then check out Like.fm, a free web service that makes starting and your own music page a breeze.
Your Like.fm page, if you are wondering, consists of a curated page of songs displayed as thumbnails, which you can share with friends, and which can be cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter.
Other in the community can browse or follow your page, and they can like or reblog individual tracks. And if you find other kindred souls whose music taste you like, you can follow them as well to discover great new music.
Want to see it in action? check out my page that I just started.
How it works: Like.fm makes things easy for itself: you can search for tracks you want to post and chances are others have posted them already, in which case you can reblog them to add to your page. If not, it will either help you find the song on YouTube or ask for a SoundCloud or other URL. Next you can tag it, add your own caption if you like, etc.
You can create ‘stacks’ out of songs, which is to say put playlists together. You could also ‘star’ songs that you would like to filter out, etc.
Finding other people: search for a song and you will see a list of people who blogged/reblogged it, and you can click on their links and explorer their pages.
Wish list: much could be made better with Like.fm
- A better way to find people to follow: why not add a ‘community’ tab with users suggested for you, having been somehow ‘matched’ with the songs that you blogged. Or maybe a visual representation of connections. Honestly, finding people to follow at the time of this writing is strangely difficult.
- A way to see everyone’s captions on a track: at once, with links, since they have that information anyway. Or perhaps to consolidate all comments that the song got, although it doesn’t seem that there are many comments anyway.
- The ability to mouse over a song and jump to a page that lists other users who also blogged it.
- Better connections to the rest of the site from your page: staring at your page, it is easy to not even know that there are links by genre that can be browsed, or to browse the ‘top users’ page.
- Some info on the songs: a release date or year would be nice, if it’s possible to somehow find that.
The verdict: while It seems that with every passing day there is a new music sharing service or two or three coming out, what I like about Like.fm is that the model – having your own personal page – tends to promote user ‘ownership’ of the project, and allows you to access and share your page from anywhere, without apps and premium plans, etc.
I also like the fact that it gives you your owl URL (like.fm/username), and that it can automatically cross post on Facebook ad Twitter. Although they got a lot right, the site does seem like it needs a lot of work and optimization; here’s hoping that it will continue to get better.
Check out Like.fm here. (Also check out my profile page for a little demo).
