The Wall Street Journal's Katherine Boehret compares two new music discovery tools, Zune's Mixview and Apple's Genius, in today's "The Mossberg Solution" column. Boehret found both positives and negatives with both tools and had better things to say about Mixview. Go ahead and check out the article, but here's the meat of the article:

After using the music-discovery software from Apple and Microsoft, I felt like Apple’s Genius tool still had a lot to learn, though the company says it will improve over time as more people start using it. Zune’s software had some similar issues, but it offered recommendations in a richer, more engaging manner, encouraging me to keep digging around and learn more about my music. Though I didn’t happen to have as much time to use Zune’s software as I did Apple’s Genius, I got more out of my Zune experience.

Both are neat ways to discovery and learn about music, but let's face it, discovery tools are in their infancy. People are attracted to certain musicians for all sorts of reasons that have not yet been incorporated into the best tools. Listeners are attracted to musicians for all sorts of reasons that go deeper than merely how the music sounds. Factors such as political leaning, diet, social causes, artists toured with and home city all say something about the person behind the music. Better tools to discovery local artists would especially help independent artists. People tend not to know what musicians are in their own backyard.