Internet revives the radio star

About two years ago, I discovered that Yahoo! had started something called LAUNCHcast. It was their online radio. You have to have an account with them for it to work, but on my old account, I had build up quite a collection of rated songs. Thursday, I got a link for Pandora, as most of you guys probably did too. I started playing with this yesterday and started finding some similarities and differences, lending me to prefer Pandora over LAUNCHcast.

The LAUNCHcast concept is similar to that of Pandora: creating specially formatted radio stations for you to listen to. With Yahoo's thing though, you create only one radio station especially formatted for you. First, you have to go though each main category of music like jazz, hip hop, rock, alternative, etc. If you click on a certain category, then it drops down and you get to chose from about 12 mainstream artists most closely associated with that genera. You can click them all or just one. It then creates your own station, so you have, like with mine, (Disclaimer: right now it doesn't really reflect my music tastes, but what I recently rated last time I listened) the genres listed are reggae, electronic/dance, and country. Not sure where those three came from. Usually it says something more like "adult alternative," rock, and jazz/ R & B. It plays songs from the major musicians that I picked and then it recommends songs from all the decades. Some obscure and others mainstream. Now let's break it down that you have the basics for Yahoo's radio.

First, lets go for the most annoying aspect of both of these online radio stations: advertisements. With Yahoo, it's overbearing. On your own personal radio station, you have unlimited skips until you get to 500 songs in a month, but about every 5 songs, you get a commercial, mostly advertising for you to upgrade and get a subscription. Sometimes it's for concerts in your area, or who ever is currently sponsoring the commercial free radio stations because there are two or three of those daily that have limited skips but no commercials. Right now it's Pepsi and Crest toothpaste. On the other radio stations, you get commercials about every 3 songs. (There are about 30 different stations that are open for listening to if you don't subscribe, but then it jumps up to about 70, or something close to that, if you subscribe.) So far, I've been listening to Pandora for about 3 or 4 hours and all I've gotten was one visual advertisement for Rock Star: Supernova. That sight was a little disturbing (Hello?! Who isn't creeped out by Tommy Lee?), but I have it minimized most of the time, so I don't see the visual ones. No audio advertisements at all. That was the biggest thing that won me over.

The rating system. Here, I have to say I favor Yahoo's way of doing things. They let you rate the artist, album, and song all differently. I find that very useful because for instance, with the White Stripes album White Blood Cells, that album isn't my ABSOLUTE favorite of theirs (Elephant!! Woot Woot!!), so I have 4 different levels of how I can rate all three different aspects of the song. I would give the band the fourth/highest level, the album the third/next highest level, and if the radio station was playing Aluminum, I would give it the lowest/first level because that song STILL gives me the jibblies after 7 years. Since I've rated all these things separately, I know that I'll still hear tons of the White Stripes, more of White Blood Cells, but I'll never have to fear hearing Aluminum and getting the jibblies again! Yay! The perfect situation. With Pandora, I've already had them play a song that I love love love by an artist that I'm not crazy about, so I had no choice but to click the thumbs up button for the song, but I have to wait for them to individually play each song from that artists and rate it when it comes along on the station that I created. That's one thing that I can do with Yahoo also. I can search for songs, albums, artists and rate them without ever having to hear them play. So I can completely avoid ever having Enrique Iglesias even though I rated Ricky Martin highly. Just kidding...maybe... If Pandora has that option, I just haven't found it yet in my site exploration. I know I can add artists to a station that I have already created, which I did. When I created my White Stripes station, I immediately added the Raconteurs and Led Zeppelin, just because they go together like peanut butter and jelly (just not around me).

As far as the music goes, on my personalized station, I was introduced to the New P's, The Jam, Blue Merle (one of my favorite "sounds like Coldplay" bands), etc., but it's not much of a let's look for underground artists kinda thing. So far, with Pandora, I've found at least 3 artists (one from each of the stations that I've created) that I've never heard of but have the major possibility of falling in love with. There are far more obscure artists on Pandora versus Yahoo, though Yahoo has a larger music database. This was the winning feature of Pandora. We all know I favor anything no one else has heard of. After all, doesn't it sound insanely cool when you get to say that the latest band you're into is either a local or a total unknown? Then you give the person a copy and spread the word and hope that they keep that indie spirit in their music. So far, the station that I favor is my White Stripes station, though I've heard of most of the artists that they are playing, maybe not the songs though. I also created one for Tori Amos, which we might as well rename "Women that play piano, kinda sing (but Tori can sing), and write angsty music" station, which is going to be nice when I'm in that kind of a mood. Yahoo offers a feature like this where you create different stations for different moods, but you have to pay $3 a month for that.

Over all, Pandora fits me better. More unknowns and less commercials. Their rating system could be better, but I'm not complaining for fear they might up the commercial playing. With my stations, I'm being very selective with what I add because I don't want to just throw all my stuff into one bin, and that's my solution for keeping things that I don't want played, not played. I'm trying to stay within the genera. I want my ducks scattered in this game.