Music recommendation site MyStrands wants to get better acquainted with you, and investors want to foot the tab.

MyStrands, a music recommendation service, on Tuesday said it snagged $24 million in funding led by Spanish bank BBVA that included existing investor Debaeque. The startup hauled in $25 million in June, bringing its total capital raised to $55 million.

Corvallis, Oregon-based MyStrands said it will use the funding for product development and business expansion.

“Right now, when you go to any web site or retailer, they recommend the same thing to you as to me,”  MyStrands representative Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria said. “In the future, everything will be personalized.”

MyStrands’ technology scans music you have stored on your PC and looks at your search preferences as well as orders to recommend bands. The service can be accessed via computers, mobile phones, and other Internet-connected devices.

The service addresses a changing media consumer. People are no longer passive TV viewers or radio listeners, Gartner analyst Mike McGuire said. Instead, they are becoming “content foragers.” 

While Google is the obvious elephant in the arena when it comes to search engines, a clear leader has yet to emerge in the recommendation engine market.

E-commerce giant Amazon uses collaborative filtering algorithms to compare purchase histories among all users in order to predict what you’ll want next. Other companies hoping to be the recommendation site of choice are French startup Criteo and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based ChoiceStream.

“A lot of these [music] sites are more observation sites than they are recommendation sites,” Mr. McGuire said. They observe that people who like X also like Y and make suggestions based off of that. An advantage of MyStrands is that it is actually a recommendation site.

“Just because I have a lot of Grateful Dead in my collection, doesn't mean I love Phish,” Mr. McGuire said. These sorts of incorrect assumptions happen a lot with solely collaborative filtering, he said.

Unlike competitors Last.fm, Pandora, imeem, or iLike, which focus exclusively on music, or Netflix’s movie recommendations, Mr. Aldamiz-echevarria said that MyStrands’ technology can be used to recommend any type of product—from music to washing machines.

Mr. McGuire finds it unlikely that these engines will be used to recommend every type of product. That would require a broad swath of consumers willing to share a lot of information about themselves. Companies would have to prove that they can be trusted with that information and provide accurate results, he said.

Although they are not disclosing partners now, Mr. Aldamiz-echevarria said that MyStrands is working with mobile and consumer-focused companies.

MyStrands’ inroads in mobile are a clear advantage, Mr. McGuire said. He expects that the mobile phone will increasingly be used as a search and discovery tool and a way to share and recommend music in social settings.

While MyStrands has a strong presence in Europe and boasted $12 million in sales this year, Last.fm, with its $280 million acquisition by CBS, is still ahead of everybody, Mr. McGuire said.

The company’s consumer services include a recommendation web site, mobile services, partyStrands, an interactive DJ service that lets club goers request and influence play lists with their cell phones, and MyStrands.TV, a YouTube music video interface similar to Middio that suggests artists similar to those the user already likes.