ReadWriteWeb

WordPress has grown by leaps and bounds from its origins as a personal blogging platform. Despite the evidence, though, a lot of folks view WordPress as a CMS that's exclusively for blogs or small sites. So what if I told you eMusic is moving to WordPress for all its CMS needs? That's exactly what Scott Taylor talked about this year at WordCamp San Francisco.

Now, eMusic isn't the world's biggest site, but it's nothing to sneeze at either. It serves around 6 million visits per month and "billions of HTTP requests" and millions of page views. The site has 400,000 subscribers. If it can handle eMusic, odds are it can handle your site as well.

EMusic, the popular subscription-based music service, just announced that it has signed a deal with Warner Music, the world's third-largest music company. This is eMusic's second deal with a major record label. In its early days, eMusic mostly focused on featuring music from independent labels. Since the middle of 2009, however, eMusic has worked on expanding its reach by bringing more mainstream music to its catalog. The company announced a deal with Sony Music in June 2008.

eMusic, one of the world's largest subscription-based music retailers, has for the first time added music from Sony's catalog to its store. Most users on eMusic subscribe to the service because of the eclectic selection of independent music it offers, and very few users were excited to hear that eMusic was going to make major changes to its service, including raising the price per song just in order to give its users access to mainstream music that they were not very likely to be interested in. While eMusic did a fine job at communicating the basic changes to the service, it didn't reveal the full extent of the changes until yesterday, and its users are anything but happy about them.

Thanks to MP3s and the Internet, we now have millions of songs readily available to us with the click of a button, but, paradoxically, this has often made it even harder to discover new music to listen to. Every online music store and every social network that focuses on online music, however, now features some kind of music recommendation system, and some services like Pandora or Slacker Radio are indeed nothing else but highly sophisticated music discovery engines. In this post, we will look at the different approaches behind some of the most popular music recommendation and discovery services.