What is more inspiring than listening to your music? Yes I’m talking to you iPod fans out there who may or may not have been listening to the same playlist over and over and ovar again.. That’s what I did at least with my little mini iPod for about a year or so until i got bored with it. I never actually got round to making new playlists, mainly because I believe listening to music should also be a relaxing, inspiring and surprising experience.. okay, and I’m too lazy and easily bored to spend my sundays making playlists. Sorry for the rant here. Let’s start again..

What is more inspiring than listening to your music? Well, new music. Better yet, new music you might even like. Unlike switching onto MTV to hear top 20 tracks all day, or mainstream radio which basically broadcasts the same tunes without the visuals, you could tune into radio with selections of music other people recommend. It’s not new, I know, but I haven’t really touched upon this yet, hence this blog entry. I’m aware of two such systems, Last.FM, which is slightly more community-y and Pandora (noticed by a friend of mine, Flashgirl, through hyves), where a smart music discovery system finds you interesting tracks. Both of which allow you to create radio channels from an artist or track name.

Without going too much into detail, let me tell you a little but about my experiences with both solutions.
At the moment I’m trying to get to grips with Last.FM, which i think might be a little more interesting because of the community aspect. Listening to your friends radio channels, joinging groups etc. It’s all a bit more complex but I hope it will be more rewarding in the end. At the moment I’m not really sure how accurate it really is and end up listening to Nelly’s latest tracks, while I’m quite sure I entered Franz Ferdinand as my reference artist. So, if i just want to listen to a few tracks from the genre I like, I find it easier to just quickly open pandora’s website, add a radiostation and let it do it’s magic. Pandora’s downside is that the reference songs narrow down a little too much for my taste and the same songs do come up quite regularly.

The best thing both of them did for me is introduce me to new artists I really like and even bought some tracks from throught the iTunes music store recently (Both have an easy click to buy feature built into their interfaces). As far as I’m concerned I’m quite happy with either, but for the moment Pandora wins it for me purely due to the ease of use, and because you really aren’t required to set up anything to make it work as you wish.

I would love to hear your experiences with recommending radio solutions like the ones i described above.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 01:46 and is filed under Music, Recommendation, Radio, Interface, Opinion, Personal, Usability, Community, Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.