Despite the wide variety of music available today, it is often difficult for a person to actually find something that agrees with his or her tastes. Qloud, a music discovery website co-founded by Mike Lewis '00, promises to make searching for new music easier. Lewis describes the site as a place that users can search when not entirely sure of their musical tastes.
"It's like asking someone what they want for their birthday; they know they want something, but they don't know what it is," Lewis said of searching for music online.
Launched in October, Qloud allows users to search for new songs through a system of tags placed on individual tracks by fellow users. For example, a user can enter "acoustic" as a primary search and refine that search by taggers' demographics like age, sex and location. After finding songs that fit the parameters, visitors can listen to a sample of a song or watch a clip of the video on YouTube.
Before starting Qloud, Lewis -- a member of Alpha Delta fraternity and captain of the soccer team while at Dartmouth -- was vice president of operations and product management at music site Ruckus. After leaving Ruckus in January 2005, Lewis, along with Qloud co-founder Toby Murdock, decided to form a new music web site that would offer users more comprehensive capabilities.
Qloud is offered as a plug-in extension that connects to iTunes or Songbird. Lewis predicts that the Qloud iTunes extension for Mac should be available this week.
Lewis asserted that Qloud is unique because it allows individual people to categorize music, and determine the relationships between songs according to their own standards. Other music search sites, like Pandora and Tempo, generate suggestions through algorithms and musicologists.
Users can also keep track of what friends are listening to and receive e-mail updates when they add new tracks.
Currently hosting around 20,000 visitors monthly, the site continues to grow in popularity, according to Lewis. Around the end of February, Qloud promises to be out of "beta," or testing, mode, with a new interface.
Lewis and Murdock receive a commission from iTunes for every song purchased as a result of a Qloud referral. Lewis said that for the time being, he is more focused on recruiting users and making the site clean than he is on revenue. But the days of free use may come to an end; he said the site may generate revenue through advertisements or subscriptions.
