Music, like food, can be a more accessible entre for some who are interested in exploring different cultures; so, I was interested in trying to find a music sharing site where I could explore music from various cultures, and perhaps even post a playlist here. Certainly the biggest site I found with a huge amount of information was the Smithsonian Global Sound — an extraordinary audio archive and educational resource.

iTunes notwithstanding, I was also curious to see if the popularity of the big social music sites like imeem and Last.fm was a North American phenomena. Turns out, that might be the case. As for Indian video and music sites, although some are out there, one of our South Asian partner publishers recently confirmed to me that the Indian Television and Cinema industry still tends to monopolize a great deal of users’ attention, and that listening to music online may not be as popular in India (as it is here) since most of them prefer to download their music rather than listen to it online.

Over the course of my brief virtual trip I found a couple of Italian music sharing sites I was already somewhat familiar with (Vitaminic and Downlovers), as well as the Spanish Quepasa, the multi-lingual Deezer (available in over a dozen languages, including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Hungarian and Danish), and Qbox.

I checked out Soundflavour, out of San Francisco. Like most of these kinds of sites, becoming a member is free. Certainly not comparable in content to an archive/resource like Smithsonian, but what I liked in particular was the ability to search music by genre (and “sub-genres”), musical instrumentation, “mood”, tempo range, subject matter… let’s just say it’s a little addictive. Soundflavour recently updated their site, adding some extra search filters, along with their “video jukebox” feature.

In the end, I found my way back to imeem, and created a widget/playlist (below) … so, without further adieu, here’s my first attempt … i hope you enjoy. And, if you have any musical suggestions, by all means leave a comment at the bottom of this post. And, if you want to visit the New Mainstream’s imeem presence directly, you can go here: http://www.imeem.com/thenewmainstream