There's a new thing called mFlow that you might have seen bits about online. Basically it's a cross between Spotify and Twitter. You find a song you like, recommend (or 'flow') it to your followers with an optional 140-character message, then they get to listen to it (if they buy it you get some cash), or 'reflow' it to their own followers.
Like Twitter, it makes little sense the first time you use it — you can search the library (which seems pretty well stocked with all sorts of music) but it just seems to be a load of 30 second clips. RUBBISH.
Well not quite rubbish. The magic happens when you start following other people. Everything they recommend appears in your inbox (which is really just a playlist of what your friends have recommended, or a Twitter stream with songs in it) and you can listen to everything in your inbox once in full. It's like a massive playlist that your friends and contacts add to throughout the day — so, like we say, it really makes sense (like Twitter) when you've got people to follow and people following you.
As for the cash thing, well the idea is that you recommend a track, and if someone buys it from your recommendation you get 20% (ie 20p in most cases) which you can put towards buying other music. We're not sure if this is a moneymaking scheme you'll be able to retire on (single tracks seem to be about, er, 20p more expensive than on iTunes) but the main appeal of this is that you get a fresh playlist of music from people from whom you want to hear recommendations. Being able to reply to 'flows' would be great — you could get a real conversation going about a track — and the whole thing running inside a program rather than a web browser feels a bit unnecessary, but it's early days and if you measure mFlow against the other 'reinventing the way you consume music' bollocks we get sent on a weekly basis it feels like it has a future.
The service isn't public yet but we've got 1000 free invites so you can test it out now: just go to the mFlow site at www.mflow.com and chuck in the invite code JUSTICE8. This is UK only for the time being — 'apols'.
If you do sign up please 'flow' us some music because to be quite frank the whole thing is overrun by indie bellends at the moment and we need some people to follow.