Musicovery: Music For Your Mood

Musicovery is a streaming music service with a twist- instead of picking songs by artist, you tell it what mood you're in and it picks the tracks for you. It allows you to refine your selections by music genre or era and clicking on the song in play allows you to buy the music from various sources such as Amazon.com, iTunes or eBay. There are two versions of the site. One is a free, ad-supported version with playback quality that's a little too lo-fi for my tastes (although it may not bother many people, especially if only played through small computer speakers). The other version requires registration and a 4 USD fee per month. That will give you high quality sound and remove the ads.

What I love about this site is that it allows you to discover new artists while still allowing the music to remain within the realm of your present mood. In essence, it does one thing and does it well. However, the layout is a mess and an absurdly large ad space dominates the right side of the page, actually covering up some of the non-ad content (unless you have your browser window stretched as wide as the Grand Canyon). The visual representation of music tracks would have been a great idea, if it weren't for the confusing cacophony of colors, patterns and inter-connecting links that had me reaching for an Aspirin within a whole 10 seconds.