Cool Hunting

Looking for new music based on your current tastes? MusicPlasma lets you search on any band or artist and it returns a family tree-like display with other bands or musicians closely related to the original search term.

For instance, put in Coldplay and artists like Radiohead, Travis, White Stripes and the Strokes pop up. Enter Madonna and the obvious come up: J.Lo, Britney, Justin, Christina, Kylie and any number of first-name pop stars (not really sure how George Strait’s related though).

It’s like six degrees of separation for music, but things here are more closely related. At first, the search may seem a little daunting, but after the first or second try, you may find yourself addicted. For fun, click on an artist’s sphere and change the display again.

The navigation is kind of tricky-- – if you click on something in the right or left portion of the screen, the entire sphere of artists moves and it’s not that easy to center it again. Plus, if you put a newer artist into the search, you tend to stump the intelligence.

It'’s not entirely intuitive, but the colorful bubbles are fun to look at.