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Recommendation engines will often rely on the wisdom of crowds to suggest music. But there are a lot more ways that can be used to determine what music a person may like.

Paul Lamere writes a lot on this topic. He's a former researcher at Sun Labs where he explored ways to organize, search for and discover music. He's the author of Music Machinery, one of the best blogs out there about music and technology. Lamere now works at Echo Nest where he manages the company's developer community. Echo Nest is a music intelligence company founded by Tristan Jehan and Brian Whitman, who met at the MIT Media Lab while pursuing their doctorates in music understanding and synthesis research.

Fresh Hot Radio is a slick new web application that aims for some very specific objectives: High quality, fresh, free-to-download independent music that you can start listening to right away. Part Pandora, part YTMND, and as minimalistic as you can get, Fresh Hot Radio always brings hand-picked, high-energy tracks that you can enjoy while you work.

Mufin, a music recommendation service we looked at a few times in the past, just released a stand-alone music player for Windows that combines some of the most interesting features of Mufin's online service and iTunes plugin into one coherent desktop application. While it looks and acts like a standard music jukebox, Mufin Player's most important new feature is that gives you a new way to manage and sort your music collection based solely on the similarity between songs.

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.