I was browsing Yahoo! News the other day and stumbled upon an interesting article about some software that attempts to match listeners with musicians and it sounded intriguing enough that I decided to grab the software and give it a shot.

Indy is the first one I gave a shot at and the first thing that I noticed was the spartan nature of the application sort of resembling an iPod Shuffle but with a screen and a ratings bar, granted the intention is only to sample new artists, not serve as a media hub. It serves up a wide mix of artists bouncing between singer-songwriters, jazz vocalists, quirky rock acts, to everything in-between. A nice touch is the ability to visit the homepage of the artist just by clicking the scrolling display which makes it very easy to learn more about the music that is being played. The icing on the cake is that the music is downloaded and stored locally, organized into folders by rating.

Overall, Indy is a nifty little tool though it would be nice to see a couple of more elements added to the service. One enhancement that would go a long way would be the ability to specify the types of genres available for listening so that the user can either narrow or widen the available selections based on their personal preferences; being able to skip the occasionally grind-core track would be fine with me. Also, having message boards where listeners and artists could communicate with each other could go a long way in providing a richer experience for all of those involved, at the moment the experience feels a tad isolated.

If you are in the market for something new and like taking aural risks give Indy a shot.

In the next post I’ll take a look at iRATE Radio, which hopefully won’t sound as angry as its name implies.