Since OiNK is gone, I am having a hard time discovering new music. I went from a couple new albums every couple of weeks to absolutely nothing and my general happiness and mood has taken a dive since then. (Fallacy!) I was thinking: how can I possibly discover new music now? I can go to Metacritic and look at their list, but I have to click on each one to see if it’s any good or anything I’d actually like. I can go to Pitchfork, and again, the interface is clumsy and reading their reviews makes me feel like I am dusting my brain with a heat-ray. OiNK was brilliant because I could go and look at something really easily: what the most popular albums for the day were. The internet has nothing else like this. Albums would download in seconds so I could listen, decide if I like it, and then get stuck seeding it forever, but that was the price I paid.

Now I’ve got nothing. So, how about this: a music service, preferably free, that scans your entire music collection and tells you what albums you don’t have, what albums are coming out soon, and maybe what albums you’ll like based on your collection’s similarity. This service would work surprisingly well even without listening data. You tie it into your Last.FM account, or your iTunes database (why doesn’t iTunes do this already! they even have a MUSIC STORE built in!) and your recommendations get even better.

But the important thing is this: if it sees that I like Queens of the Stone Age, but I don’t have Songs for the Deaf, it should say, HEY YOU! You should get Songs for the Deaf! Or if Eels are coming out with a new album in a few weeks, notify me and never stop notifying me! Give me a COUNT-DOWN on the front page of whatever screen I go to. “Two weeks until the new Eels CD comes out!” would be incredible.

Most of all: make it automatic, I don’t want to have to go in and put in all my artist and album names. Make it Web2.0, so I can easily modify what bands should be a part of my collection and what bands shouldn’t be, (in case you download music for your girlfriend). Make the ’scanner’ a small program you download that scans all your ID3 data (or MusicBrainz if that is your bag) and then uploads the data to the server.

Someone make it happen. If this already exists (and not bundled within some bloated software), please let me know that I am stupid.