My new Mini isn't here yet, so I've been driving a car w/ no Empeg for a couple weeks now... One of things I realize that I miss out on with the Empeg is a certain degree of serendipity. I choose the music that I like and listen to it constantly and often miss out on other things. I look at my TiVo, and it seems like a system to find new music might be kind of cool....

I know there are quite a few problems with this approach, but I'm tossing it out just for discussion purposes... Maybe someone has some better approaches (or maybe nobody cares about this at all ):

1) Add a rating system -3 to +3 for MP3's (this is optional, but would just make the evaluation criteria better). This could be done in jEmplode rather than on the player itself so Empeg owners don't start wrecking and dying while they try to rate music while driving.
2) Find some datasource that can fulfill the request "given that I like song X, tell me a song Y that I might also like". I was thinking I could just spider content from Amazon -- they have so much good data on user traits that I could write an app that could search for a highly rated song on Amazon, grab the other recommended albums, pick a random song off of it and save the name.
3) OK -- caveat with "piracy is terrible, etc, etc", but call this a sampling station -- buy the cd if you like it: There is a really slick java implementation of the OpenNap protocol. I could take the tune that was randomly selected and search the OpenNap network for the MP3, download it, and upload it to the Empeg.

My thought is that you would just plug your Empeg in at night and hit a "Surprise Me" button in jEmplode and it would go off and look for music for you. It just seems that if you combine the "always hear what I want" of the Empeg with "maybe there's some stuff I'm missing out on" that is targeted towards your preferences, it might make for a cool system. Basically TiVo Suggestions for MP3's.

The thing that sucks about the Amazon approach is that you could only look for songs that would be recommended based on a single other song. Ideally you would take the full set of music that you rated highly and find recommendations based on that entire set. The fix for this would be to have users put in their Amazon username/pw and use the suggestions that are already configured in Amazon for recommendations 9rather than using the mp3's on your Empeg as the original source)

Comments? Suggestions?