The “Indie Shuffle” was a term used by me and my friends to describe a fairly non-descript dancing style usually performed during jangly guitar songs in clubs. But it’s also the name of a San Francisco-based indie music blog, which serves to shuffle (get it?) through a tonne of independent music — old and new — and surface the pick of the bunch.
As part of the SPIN Magazine/Buzz-Media network, Indie Shuffle say that it has been reeling in pretty substantial traffic of late – around 2.5m monthly pageviews, and now it also has its very own iOS app,
Indie Shuffle’s mobile app taps the SoundCloud API to provide curated, ad-free playlists based on similar artists and genres. Users can launch their playlists starting with a specific genre, browse the ‘Popular’ list, or check out the latest recommendations. Each song also has a review written by one of their staff-writers.
In addition to viewing by ‘Latest’ or ‘Popular’, you can simply browse the catalogue by genre or view your favorites – the latter of which requires you to log-in using your Facebook credentials. A little bit annoying, but not a deal-breaker.
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A sweet feature here is ‘Shuffle’ – randomly played tracks from across all genres, tapped entirely from SoundCloud. And as with any app worth its salt these days, if you find a tune you really like, you can share it with the world:
It’s worth noting here that the app covers rock, electronic, hip-hop, folk, remixes, covers and everything in between. And this isn’t restricted to the mobile realm either – by ‘Favoriting’ a track, it’s automatically stored in a personal playlist, accessible through the mobile app and a browser-based website.
Indie Shuffle is a really nicely designed app, and works entirely as it claims to. If you like a little bit of human curation in your music-listening life, it’s definitely worth checking out. If you’re looking to surface new music from multiple blogs and sites through automation, you may wish to check out Shuffler.fm instead.
Indie Shuffle is available to download for free now, and an Android version is expected to launch soon.
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