TasteKid Review (How To Find Similar Music, Movies & Books)

Written by Rob Nichols on January 20, 2010 · Filed under How To, Internet, Review 

Tastekid.com is a great website for anyone who is a love of music, movies and/or books and wishes to expand their library or collection with more similar artists, films or authors. I stumbled upon it whilst looking for a site that did exactly this and it was the first hit. To be honest, I have come to trust any site that hits the top of the prestigious Google rankings.

For instance in the case of music, the site is a database of all artists that are similar to the artist you enter in the search box at the top. Anyone who is a user of sites such as eBay or Amazon will know that they regularly suggest items similar to ones you have purchased before. Tastekid works in a similar fashion to this, only with music, movies and books.

For example, when I entered ‘Beyonce’, it returned a vast quantity of results that were in my opinion extremely accurate. Beyonce herself covers a fairly wide range of genre’s and I was surprised to see that Tastekid.com managed to include artists fitting into several of these music tastes and origins, such as Leona Lewis to Jay-Z or even Luther Vandross who she has duet-ed with in the past.

Once you have browsed the results, you can select a few of them that take your fancy and it adds them to your list in order to find even more accurate results with the next batch. This is a great feature as it means you can almost narrow your searches down to an artists that you’re guaranteed to enjoy. As well as this, it also displays a short blurb about that individual artist that you have selected and provides a short music video of their stuff. I’m guessing the video’s aren’t stored locally but streamed from elsewhere, but either way it’s a nice touch.

As well as filtering your favourites, it also displays other artists that it deems to be popular at the current time. Most likely compiled from most popular selections and searches. However I’m not one that enjoys simply slotting into a crowd, however to stand out, so I prefer to stick with my own search results.

Some extras included on the site include links to their Twitter or Facebook pages, which if followed send you regular recommendations, however the down side of this is that you cannot filter what you receive, so like I said above, you would become a sheep of the music industry just following what’s hot and avoiding what’s not. For some that might be great, but it’s not for me. The site also provides widgets that you can attach to your webpage or blog so users can find music whilst on your site.

Just to complete the site, they have added an easy to use contact form for suggestions which I can only imagine means they’re looking to improve the site and the database of artists.

Overall, I found the site to be extremely useful for music and I found some artists that really took my fancy. So much so that I went straight out and bought the CD’s. Therefore, from my point of view it has been of great benefit to me as well as the music artists and record companies (something of a rarity in this file sharing age we live in).

I would definitely recommend TasteKid. I primarily use it for music, but if you’re also interested in movies and books, you’ll be pleased to hear that it appears to be just as useful for finding similar movies and books for you to try.

Also there’s even a TasteKid iPhone app so you can easily find suggestions when you’re out and about, for instance when you’re in a store shopping for some new music, movies or books or even having a discussion down the pub – very useful indeed!