Personalised music magazine from your attention data

Thanks to Tristan for alerting me (via the BBC's Radio Labs blog) to the ultra-cool idiomag, which creates a daily personalised digital music magazine based on your listening preferences. The homepage invites users to enter either their two favourite artists or, more excitingly, their username from one of a host of popular online music services (Last.fm, Pandora, iLike, MyStrands, MOG, MySpace and Bebo are all supported) from where it pulls in details of your musical proclivities.

I opted for Last.fm as the primary custodian of my musical attention data and I have to admit that I found the resulting magazine pretty compelling. My first 'issue' served up Billboard.com news articles on Eels and Radiohead (complete with embedded video), a Junkmedia review of a Beck gig, a Wikipedia article on Indie Pop, a Ben Folds photo gallery (sourced from Flickr) and a LOSINGTODAY review of Kaiser Chiefs' single 'Loves Not a Game (But I'm Winning)'.

Presenting the content in the style of a print magazine (complete with page turns), is a smart move on the part of idiomag as it makes the personalisation much higher impact. We have become used to personalisation in the digital space but personalised print media has a residual novelty value (example) because the cost of print runs was once so prohibitive.

Throw in some standard Web 2.0 functionality (Love it, Bin it, Archive it, Email it to a friend, Share it on Facebook etc.), a couple of revenue streams in the form of interactive advertising and links to buy (from 7digital) and the obligatory Facebook app and your looking at rather a slick package. Time will tell whether the content is consistently compelling enough to warrant a daily visit although today is unlikely to be my last. Nice job guys.

Related posts:
Next generation music discovery
New (to me) music apps
New (to me) music apps - part two