Argh! I knew this would happen. It’s such a cliché… Today I found Uplister, which a site very like what Musical Taste would be like if it too had received $6 million in Venture Capital funding. Hey, the team over here at Musical Taste have really made a go of things on our initial $10 monthly investment, but I guess there are limits to what is possible with the resources we (er, I) had…

Anyway, I hate to promote a rival site, but here’s the scoop on uplister – it’s essentially a souped up, sexier version of Art of the Mix, with the dimension of individual song recommendations à la Musical Taste thrown in. In order to take part, you download an application which runs on your computer (PC only – fascists…). This doubles as a browser; you then make personal playlists (you can search their enormous database for ideas or have it fill details in for you). If a song in your mix is not in their database (this happened for 8 of the 12 songs I put in), they add it to the database. I guess this system it open to abuse/errors, but it’s a handy way for them to build up their database quickly, as is proved by the incredible databases at Gracenote (formally CDDB) and Audiogalaxy which use similar methods. Once your mix is ‘published’, links to sound samples automatically appear if they’re available, and there is the same kind of community feel there is at Musical Taste. I suspect my site is more browser friendly, and there is potentially more info for each song on my site (e.g. year, country etc). But aside from that, I have to admit I was in awe of uplister, and I stayed pretty quiet for a few hours after I first checked the whole thing out…

Esther is going to England for a few weeks, leaving on Monday. So starting then, I’m going to try and stop piddling around with my website, buying records and searching on ebay. I’m going to make my own record instead…