Gigabeat
Gigabeat's gigaspiral is a spiral that presents related artists at different points along a graphical S-curve. When you input an artist that you would like to use as a music discovery starting point, the gigaspiral orients itself so that the artist in question becomes the center of the curve. Then, band names appear along the top and bottom curves of the spiral. The names are close to the center, and they illustrate their degree of relatedness to the center artist. Artists categorized as mainstream appear on the upper arm of the spiral, and the lesser-known musicians appear on the bottom.

The gigaspiral at work

Cofounder and CEO Erin Turner describes the gigaspiral as a unique means of masking an equally unique collaborative filtering system. "Behind the scenes, we have patents pending for the collaborative filtering method and for the amazing search technology that lets us index the thousands of streams that are on the Web. It's about scalability and about using technology to simplify entertainment and bring music fans what they're looking for. The gigaspiral is what we call data visualization. Once we know who you are, we can start to return results that are unique to you."

Erin Turner, Gigabeat Cofounder and CEO

The gigaspiral is interesting in that the behind-the-scenes collaborative filtering process is multifaceted. Rather than focusing on one means of gathering and evaluating data, Gigabeat considers multiple avenues. "The interesting thing about Gigabeat is that we take numerous factors into account. We look at a combination of collaborative filtering, editorial, genre information, and musical analysis. You only have to put in one or two artists, and we can instantly direct you to a particular neighborhood of artists. And as you enter in more information about whether you like or dislike artists, the recommendations become more and more specific to your tastes."

A first-time user of the gigaspiral will immediately realize what is happening at the interface level. The great thing about Gigabeat is that it conceals all the complicated technology from the user and relies on an intuitive design to facilitate easier navigation. Under the hood, Gigabeat uses existing genre information from the Muse database and then simultaneously references your personal user preferences to complete the equation.

Turner adds, "We're a technology-driven site. What you do every day on the gigaspiral will ultimately affect your results. Our artist and genre information all come from the Muse database. They have several hundreds of thousands of artists and songs that have been classified into at least two different genres each. We have them in our database, and we can compare that with other information: music editorial information and the profiles of individual users. Because our system is automated, we return results in a fast way, and because the technology is scaled, we can return specific results for every user, for millions and millions of users."

Essentially, Gigabeat claims to take into consideration all the different aspects of collaborative filtering and other music sites and combines them into one unique system. As well, in the coming weeks, Gigabeat plans to add more personalization options to better facilitate music discovery.

Which one is the best?