One thing I was missing for many many years is a (free) Internet service, that informs you of new music releases for specific artists. I even thought about making such a thing myself. A year ago or so I discovered such a service called soundamus which I highly recommend! One ingenious feature is the integration with one’s Last.fm stats.
But the artists considered aren’t limited to your Last.fm profile. Other services like Pandora are also supported and you can alternatively manually define which artists you’d like to track.
The resulting list of upcoming releases is available as webpages, an RSS feed and iCal. So you can also integrate that iCal feed into a calendar software like Google Calendar. From my understanding, the data of releases is from Amazon Webservices, so more obscure releases might not be included (but I didn’t notice that so far).
Here are examples for the available data sources for my Last.fm profile:
- Webpages http://www.soundamus.net/lfmnr/user/FrankZabbath/html
- RSS http://www.soundamus.net/lfmnr/user/FrankZabbath/rss
- iCal http://www.soundamus.net/lfmnr/user/FrankZabbath/ics
There are more features and new features are being added. Check out the Last.fm Group for details on that.
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