Streaming radio

[illusionofjoy]

I've recently discovered two new online streaming stations: Last.fm and Pandora. The former requires a software download, so I've yet to try it out because the last thing I need to do right now is add more stuff to my C:\ drive. However, one can listen to every track from Division on Last.fm, if one chooses.

The Pandora station I have been playing around with for the last couple of days. Created by The Music Genome Project, this is a Flash player that allows one to create several different stations within their user profile. One begins by entering a song or artist they like and the player goes on to play music based on the stylistic qualities of previous entries. Unlike LAUNCHcast, one does not rate songs based on a scale of 1-5 stars (or 1-100, if you've set it up for very fine-tuned ratings), but merely gives a "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" to songs for whatever particular station they are working on.

When I first started playing around with Pandora, I entered New Order as the artist I wanted to start with. The player went through its database and played what it considered to be the group's defining song, in this case, "The Perfect Kiss" (the LP version from Low-Life in this case). What ended up happening was that I heard song after song that pretty much sounded like "The Perfect Kiss." It got really boring really quickly.

So, I decided to try something different. My next experiment was to make a Reggae station. I began with Bob Marley (because to idiot white kids who grew up in small towns, Bob Marley is the only reggae artist) and then loaded up the player with every reggae, ragga, ska and Jamaican dancehall artist I had ever heard of, regardless of whether or not I knew their repertoire particularly well (which in most cases, I didn't). It took me several minutes to do this, during which the station had established itself in a healthy rocksteady groove.

My next step in station formatting was to add songs which matched the style, but were by artists who weren't strictly reggae song smiths. This included works like "Watching The Detectives" by Elvis Costello and "Rudy Can't Fail" by The Clash – both technically reggae songs, but done by Englishmen better known as new wavers or punks.

So, what was the point of this? Well, while my LAUNCHcast station sounds like my old radio show, with genres all mixed together, my Pandora profile contains several stations, allowing me to compartmentalise genres. While I generally condemn narrowcasting, the Pandora stations have effectively allowed me to focus on genres and styles that I otherwise might not get a chance to. This is actually Pandora's advantage over LAUNCHcast – that one can actually bypass familiar favourites to focus on something completely new.

However, I do admit that I like the LAUNCHcast rating system better. A "yay" or "nay" to a song is far too simple for my tastes. In fact, the only reason I probably haven't reset my LAUNCHcast profile to allow me to rate songs from 1-100 instead of just 1-5 is because I know I'd become even more obsessed over ranking things than I am already. I'm bad enough as it is, making sure that songs which are duplicated on special editions of albums, re-issues and "best of" compilations all get the same star rating. This is probably one of the reasons I have over 10,000 songs rated – that, and the fact that being at a college radio station allowed me to hear a lot of albums.

My ultimate wish for any of these services is that I'd be able to synchronise them with the rankings in my copy of Windows Media Player. Free.fm offers a plug-in which will actually allow one to synchronise ratings from their stream with ones already entered in Windows Media and LAUNCHcast, but the road doesn't go both ways and one can forget about Windows and LAUNCHcast shaking hands at all.

Still, unlike modern terrestrial radio, these stations have allowed me to hear a lot of things that I probably wouldn't have heard otherwise. The era of the live DJ is already over, but the era of Clear Channel playlist dominance may well be gone too – at least for us music geeks with over 10,000 items rated.