No, I’m not talking about downloadable, put-it-on-your-iPod-and-go music (well, the sites do make it easy to buy the singles as a download). I’m talking about music to listen to when you’re connected to the internet.
There are lots of sites that provide ways to listen to songs online. There are three that I want to briefly touch on. Each require a free registration to do anything beyond listen.
On-Demand: iMeem
First, imeem.com bills itself as “a social network where millions of fans and artists discover new music, videos, and photos, and share their tastes with friends.” That’s great and all, but for my money, it’s a place to get on-demand singles to listen to. Do a search and you can come up with at least one song for most artists. I’ve even searched for artists I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have and gotten a hit. There are a few that don’t have representation yet, but it is a social site, so you can even upload it yourself if you want. It’s like YouTube for music. As a social site, one of its focuses (foci, for you elitists), is sharing. It’s easy to embed clips (not full songs, usually) on your blog, or Facebook, or wherever. That’s a nice feature, though I’d prefer to be able to choose the part of the song for the clip.
Other than YouTube, that’s the best way I’ve found to get a quick hit of on-demand music.
Internet Radio
The other two sites I’ve played with are both “self-programmed” internet radio stations. “Self-programmed” is a bit of a misnomer, though, because it’s not like you choose the individual songs, or even artists, to play on the station. You identify some criteria and it pulls together related songs for you to enjoy. As the songs are playing, you can rate them and that affects the frequency of that and similar songs/artists on the station. That’s still a step up, in my opinion, from a traditional radio station where you have no control over the playlist at all. And because the choices are based on some criteria you entered, any songs/artists you haven’t heard before have a better chance of being something you like.
LAUNCHcast
Years ago I found a site that has since been bought by Yahoo! and is now Yahoo! Music’s LAUNCHcast. I put a lot of time into rating songs on my station, but there are still some surprise entries in there every once in a while that I downright hate. The self-referential ads inserted between every fifth song or so get annoying too. Still, it’s a good eclectic mix of my favorite types of music, and the good far outweighs the bad.
On LAUNCHcast, music is chosen by identifying artists and genres initially, then rating individual songs, albums, and artists. I like that you can be pretty granular in your ratings (scale of 1-100 or a 5-star method – your choice), which gives me a sense of better control.
The downside of this one is that it only works in Internet Explorer, which means I rarely listen to it anymore, because I rarely fire up IE. Plus, it drives me crazy that they refuse to support the other browsers so I stay away on principle for the most part. Still, I do enjoy listening to the station every few months and would listen more if they were more open. If you’re on IE all the time anyway, this may not be an issue for you.
Pandora
More recently (today, in fact), I ran across Pandora.com. This gets my vote for the best way to listen to internet radio. The interface is Flash-based, so over 90% of the world should have no problem with compatibility. It’s also incredibly simple to get started. Just identify a single artist or song that you like and it will identify characteristics in the Music Genome Project database that are shared with other songs to build your playlist (called ‘seeding’). These guys know music, and they are matching that knowledge with technology to support them. It’s a beautiful thing.
There are ads supporting it, but they are visual, and therefore easily ignored.
There are three minor downsides that I’ve found in the few hours I’ve been listening to Pandora. First, the rating system is kind of limited (thumbs up/down), but that’s only a problem for the obsessives among us, I’d imagine (others would use terms like ‘elegant and simple’). Second, there is no easy “embed this song” or “embed this station” options that I’ve run across yet. Again, not a huge deal, but it’d be nice. Finally, a few songs seemed to repeat in a relatively short time period (an hour or so). I’m guessing that’s because I marked them as “thumbs up” and I have relatively little other information that I’ve contributed at this point so it will improve as I add further variation.
Overall, I think I’ll be spending a lot of time on my Pandora stations. The experiments I’ve been doing on it so far are promising. It does a better job of pulling together playlists I’m interested in than Yahoo! does with less interaction. Once I really start putting together ratings and additional seeds I think it will be a great station (or set of stations, as the case may be).
If you’re looking for some background music at your computer, you could do far worse than Pandora. If you’re looking for on-demand tracks, give imeem a shot.
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