I buy a lot of music online, mostly through iTunes, but also through specialized electronic music download shops such as Juno Download, Beatport or Trackitdown.

However, I recently discovered Whatpeopleplay, and I really like some of the ideas behind that particular shop. Apart from the usual goodies such as genre lists or a flash player, they also offer quite a few social features that make it even more fun to shop for music. For example, you can create your own charts, publish them and share them in your blog.

While this is certainly not revolutionary, I think this demonstrates a little twist in online shopping: While real-world shopping is often a social experience, its online equivalent is quite the contrary. As humans are social animals, it is certainly a good idea to work on that particular aspect of the online shopping experience.

Whatpeopleplay is certainly not yet the holy grail of download shops, but I like their direction.

Oh, and by the way, here’s whatIplay: