I got with individuals every-time. The tech world seems to still believe 'the crowd' (metacritic, hype machine, reader voted awards) or 'the cloud' (last.fm, amazon, pandora, if you like this try this...), with all that data, can mine the depths and bring you up something you love?

Can these things happily co-exist or - as I believe - are the machines winning the war, obscuring our ability to find individuals worth listening to? (it still irks me that people think our reviews are "drownedinsound's opinion" rather than that of an individual!)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/20/music-online-research

I read Jaron Lanier's 'You're Not a Gadget' recently and can't recommend it enough, touches on a lot of the above REALLY well http://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetwebresources.html if you've got 40mins at lunch watch this: http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/vision-videos/jaron-lanier-you-are-not-a-gadget