I've been toying with a few music services lately (I used to enjoy last.fm but it seems to have stagnated lately, and the gnome move away from rhythmbox leaves a poor substitute in banshee for this service.)
So two that I have tried are shuffler.fm and wearehunted.com, both installable via the chrome web store. At first I thought We are hunted was really good, but I get a little sad about the selection (seems to be finite, and non-adaptive to rating). Of course, there may a dozen ways to personalize my experience that I haven't explored, but I haven't toyed too much with it.
Shuffler.fm seems to aggregate music blogs, and pick music linked from them. The plus side of this is that a good deal of the music is downloadable while you listen. Since I'm one of the five people on the planet without an iPhone and permanent internet connection, downloads still seem like a great idea to me (it turns out that buying 1-2 terabytes of storage per year is cheaper than mobile internet).
All in all, I appreciate being exposed to these services, and the new music they are introducing to my ears.
7 comments:
Why not Pandora?
So, with pandora, there's this horrible front end that only works if you know what you want to hear. The internet has enough echo chambes for me. Fair enough, last.fm was mostly the same with a different user group. But the idea of hearing "only music you'll love" is a little troubling. Honestly, how much value do you put in netflix's rating system? It purports to do the same thing (and is totally thrown off by Beth and I sharing one account -- what's like Metropolis and Law and Order?)
But I will play around with it, amazing to hear from you.
Okay, so it's a little cool, the ads are painful, but easily tabbed away to the background. The inability to select some of the features in 'why was this chosen' (say you were really interested in hearing more mildly syncopated rhythms) is a place where improvement is more than possible. My initial impression -- search is a bad way to find things you weren't already looking for -- still stands.
I pay for Pandora One http://www.pandora.com/pandora_one (not that expensive) kills the ads, and gets me a nice desktop app and better quality audio... I actually use a mix of Pandora and Internet Radio (Say through iTunes), the internet radio is my channel for new kinds and styles of music that I may have not been aware of (but find that I love anyway), and Pandora is for finding and listening to music I know I love... Initially it gives a good deal of unknown music, as it isn't so US centric, but once you've learned of the other bands in a particular genre that you were unaware of, it starts to become a little less fresh.
Yeah, radio is still a good route to go. I'm really not into paying for music, and stealing is such a bother. So I'd prefer to find things people like sharing, preferably not electronic synthesized concept tracks. Glad to hear it gets a little better if you pay for it, but I really don't pay for site memberships, since there is so much for free and my time is valueless.
spotify.com
Thanks, I was waiting for the invite system to be back up. My cave is only so deep, the echoing thunder of a US spotify release was heard even there. It seems like I will still be waiting for a while. Almost as disappointing as not being on google+ earlier than I was.
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