TC50 Nostalgia, Part One

Hello there,

One harrowing redeye JetBlue flight later, I'm back in NYC, and already nostalgic about the sweet myJambi times at TechCrunch50. We'll be rehashing the conference on the blog over the next week, but I thought I'd jump-start things with a short review of a couple music sites I'm excited about.

Now, I love my music sites. There are already a couple great tools in the space: Hype Machine, Pandora, Indaba, and OhMyRockness, among others. After seeing their demos at TC50, I'm optimistic about three new additions: Grooveshark Lite, BlueHaze, and BoJam.

GrooveShark Lite might just fill the whole left in my heart by the premature departure of Muxtape. While it isn't quite as clean and simple as my old favorite, it does offer a lot of functionality. Like Pandora, it allows me to steam full-length songs, and has an "autoplay" feature that will populate my music queue with other songs I'll like. Unlike Pandora, it also allows me to add entire albums of my choosing to that queue as well, so I can mix my favorites with surprise suggestions. It looks like there are a few bugs--duplication of songs in particular--but I'm excited to use it and excited to see what else the team rolls out.


If you love concerts as much as I do, please go check out BlueHaze. It provides full concert support services--notifications about upcoming shows, updates about what shows your friends are attending, a place to upload concert photos and reviews, and a home for your personal concert history. Even better, their iPhone application let's you do it in real-time. Even better than that, the founder is incredibly nice and he managed to sneak a musician into the demo pit to play live and he collected demopit chips in a guitar case. Awesome? Yes.

BoJam, one of the 52 finalists, is a wholly different kind of music site. For those of you who are more musically gifted than I am, you are in luck: BoJam has created a place for musicians to mix, record, and collaborate on songs over the internet. Their demo, set to Toto's Africa, did a cute job of explicating what exactly this means. It has the potential to be a great rehearsal tool for artists, even if the recording functionality doesn't work out. Take a look and let me know if you agree.


Happy musical Friday,
Nell