Axehole

A new community-driven music discovery service, Goombah, launched today.

Goombah is a free desktop application for Mac or Windows that provides music recommendations based on each user’s taste and the power of community. Goombah analyzes each user’s iTunes collection and listening behavior and connects them to people and music that match their taste. Users can sample recommendations and purchase them from various online sources, download free, legal MP3s, and browse entire music libraries of matching members and friends.

Goombah, whose name means close friend or trusted advisor, uses “matching member” libraries to generate virtual consensus on recommendations. Recommendations are limited only by the array of music in Goombah members’ collections, and are not influenced by what is marketed or narrowed by a pre-selection of tracks or artists. According to the company, the music recommendations continually change as the community grows and are not only precise, but diverse and full of pleasant surprises.
Users can control the range of Goombah’s recommendations with an “Adventurous” slider, changing from popular recommendations to fringe artists with a click. Personalized recommendations, matching members and free music can be easily generated by iTunes playlist, genre, artist or any combination of tracks.

“As consumers’ music libraries transition from physical CDs to virtual files, and the sheer number of ‘tastemakers’ increases, finding reliable sources of recommendations for new music — that map to his or her personal tastes — is becoming more difficult,” said Mike McGuire, research VP, Gartner. “Consumers are looking for tools which can help manage a more complex environment while giving them ways to link with like-minded music fans.”

Goombah offers a wide variety of free, legal MP3s from established and emerging artists that are targeted to users based on their taste. Users can download these tracks to play on their iPod or other music player and keep them forever. This promotional music is sourced from record labels and third-party distributors, vetted for quality, and updated weekly on “Free Music Fridays.”

“Goombah provides a compelling way for consumers to discover music and build their personal collections. We also offer a way for artists to efficiently find their audience regardless of how large or small it may be,” said Diane Sammer, CEO of Emergent Music, LLC, the company that developed Goombah.

“Goombah’s distributed approach and matching technology makes it the workhorse of recommendation services, resulting in quality taste-based matches for all users. Goombah finds the best tastemakers for each user and music spreads through the community organically like word-of-mouth between friends,” explained Sammer.