2008 Woodie Awards
Online music taking off
Sara Rannells/Online Reporter and Chris Essig/Online Interactive Editor
Issue date: 10/26/07 Section: Arts and Entertainment
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Some are well known and others may be new to you. They all have different features and software associated with them, so it's just about finding the one that works best for you.
Pandora
One great site radio-type site is Pandora. Listening to the songs is free and no software needs to be downloaded. It's a little different than traditional online radio sites, because it customizes stations for you based on your favorite songs or artists.
It was created in 2000 by founder Tim Westergren who wanted to give listeners a way to experience new music; he calls it the Music Genome Project. He examines songs and determines their "magical musical identity" based on their melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and vocal harmony.
"It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records," he said. "It's about what each individual song sounds like."
The site features songs from tens of thousands of different artists from "popular to obscure" with a huge variety of songs.
To customize your station, you first enter the name of a favorite song or artist; for example, John Mayer.
Then the site creates a radio station for you featuring songs from that artists and others like it. First they play a song that exemplifies the average style of the artist; with John Mayer they chose "I'm Gonna Find Another You" off his Continuum album.
Next the station explores other songs/artists that have similar musical qualities to the artist you chose. John Mayer brought up a variety including the Counting Crows' "St. Robinson In His Cadillac Dream," then ALO's (Animal Liberation Orchestra) "Girl, I Wanna Lay You Down," and later Rhett Miller's "Come Around."
It keeps playing different songs for you based off of the artist you entered. Once you register-for free-you can save up to 100 different stations based on the songs/artists you like.
There is a subscription service offered for about $36 a year, which allows you to play the stations on your phone or on the Pandora home equipment. This service also gives you access to the ad-free site.
The only downside to the site is that you can't download the songs you hear. It's purely a radio thing, so if you want to get the songs, you'll have to go to a music download site to get them.
I highly recommend it. It will give you songs and artists you may never have heard of that are similar to your favorites.
iTunes
Probably the most popular and well-known music download Web site and software is iTunes.
Just download the software and you're off watching videos and movies and listening to songs, podcasts and audiobooks. This software definitely has everything you're looking for and it's relatively easy to use.
The iTunes store offers a variety of ways to find the songs and videos you want. There's an easy-to-use search field where you can type in the song, artist or album you want to find and download.
The site also has a "Top Songs" list with the most popular downloads of the moment. You can browse through the different categories/genres of music, also. Song downloads cost $0.99 to $1.29 per song and videos are a bit more.
If you want free iTunes music, you can check out their radio feature. It has 25 categories, ranging from alternative to country to hip-hop to jazz.
There are also categories for comedy, talk and religious radio. Each category has several subcategories which are the "stations." Click and play to your heart's content for free.
RealPlayer
A similar and also well known site is RealPlayer Music. They offer millions of songs to choose from and boast the "highest sound quality of any music store," with 192 kbps AAC. The site offers song, video, movie and game downloads as well as a free radio feature.
Song downloads start at $0.49 in the music store. The site also has the Rolling Stone Top 10 feature, with the music magazine's top ten "hot tracks" each week. All the songs on this list are downloadable for $0.49.
Similar to iTunes, RealPlayer has a radio feature that is free to use and has stations divided into genre categories like Rock/Pop, Country and R&B. They also have stations for sports, news and talk radio, such as NPR.
To download and listen to the radio for this site you have to download the latest version of RealPlayer, available for free on the Web site.
You can also download Rhapsody, a subscription-based software, that gives you personalized artist recommendations, discounts on song downloads and commercial-free radio.
Launchcast
Yahoo Music also has a similar type site, with music downloads and a radio feature called LAUNCHcast. This radio site also divides stations into genres, but also has some interesting stations with a different mix of songs.
While you're listening to a station, the site gives you a list of similar stations that you might also like to listen to based on the genre you choose.
Customize your own radio station on LAUNCHcast for free by registering with the site. To customize your station, you select a genre, and they play you their recommended songs. Then you rate each song so they can better customize what you like and don't like.
Go back to Yahoo Music and download the songs you like to your computer or mp3 player. Download Yahoo Plus for $2.99 per month and get more song choices, unlimited radio listening and song skipping as well as commercial free listening.
There are no software downloads required for the free stuff or the radio.
Limewire
Another popular music download site is Limewire, a slightly less legal option for getting music.
The big bonus with Limewire is that all the songs are free, because you are "file sharing" with other members.
This "peer to peer" file sharing site requires you to download their free software in order to get and share music. The site claims to have no "attached" software to the program like adware or spyware.
The site has a search feature that retrieves songs for you from the "sharing" network. It also has an iTunes integration so you can put your downloaded songs into your iTunes library and onto your iPod if that's the mp3 player you use.
The software is a little complicated to download and get it working correctly, but once you work out the kinks it's pretty easy to use. They also have a technical support site to help you out with any problems.
Explore the options and decide which Web site is right for you. They each have their own unique qualities and features.
Some may find this online age to take away from the nostalgia of the record store, but I like to look at it as an easier way to hear the songs and artists that mold your musical taste.
Thanks to the internet, streaming radio is as popular as it has ever been. One of the reasons is the advent of personal streaming radio stations that allow the listener to decide what type of music is played on the station. In short, the station is designed for you, not the vast music listening audience.
Below are three of the most popular radio station sites and how they rate:
1. Pandora Radio - At the head of this new medium is Pandora, "radio from the Music Genome Project," as the site says.
Pandora is appealing and popular because of one simple reason: it is easy to use. The second a listener goes to the site they will be prompted to enter an artist or song that they like and just like that, the station is created.
From there, additional artists or songs can be added to the station to make it more specific to your particular demands. One can also give the songs played a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down," the latter of which will cause the station to move on to a new song. Be warned though, listeners can only fast forward past a song five times per hour.
Like many radio station sites (and Web sites in general), an account is required to listen to Pandora for more than a few minutes. Fortunately, creating an account does have its advantages.
First off, 100 custom radio stations can be saved under one's account. Listeners can also bookmark songs that they like so they will be played more often or they can ban a song from being played for a month if they grow tired of it.
Overall, the Music Genome Project does a great job finding songs and artists that relate to the listener's initial song or artist. When I type in Parliament, for instance, I get classic P. Funk songs and artists like The Meters, Sly and the Family Stone, Earth, Wind and Fire, and James Brown.
But Pandora also plays a number of more obscure artists as well, meaning one can listen to Pandora not only to hear their favorites but also broaden their musical horizon. From what I have seen, Pandora is much better than its competitors at finding songs that relate to your preferences. Add that to the site's quickness and the ease of setting up a station and one can see why Pandora is as popular as it is.
2. LAUNCHcast Radio - While LAUNCH offers genre-specific radio stations, it also allows listeners to create their own station.
Like Pandora, an account is required but the similarities stop there. Instead of the simple "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" options, Launch allows the listener to rate songs on a scale of one to four. But it's not just songs. Listeners can rate artists themselves, albums, genres and sub-genres. Listeners can also add influencers - stations that the listener likes that they want to crossover into their own - and even moods if one decides to buy LAUNCHcast Plus.
Such ability is daunting and will result in a radio station that is never quite finished but instead finely tuned with every listen. One of the problems, however, is it is easy to get sidetracked when listening to your station. With so many options, listeners may spend hours rating every song or album that they like instead of just listening to the station and browsing the internet. In short, LAUNCHcast is almost too much of a good thing.
Naturally the more you rate, the better tuned your station is. Listeners who have had a station for months will likely recognize the majority of the artists playing on their station. But Launch does attempt to switch it up every once in a while and play a song that you haven't rated yet. However, because of LAUNCH's expansive rating abilities, there are possibilities of running into a song that will leave you scratching your head.
For the sake of this article, I went back to LAUNCH's site and listened to my old radio station that I made in high school.
While the majority of my musical interests lied in hardcore, punk, metal, and some rap, I still liked quite an array of music and my ratings reflected that. I, for instance, liked a few indie songs and rated the genre fairly high.
When listening to my old station, I ran into a lot of songs that I would have appreciated but some that I wouldn't have. For instance, artists like Debbie Harry (?) and Ferraby Lionheart (?) played because the former was a "rock" artist (how open-ended is that genre?) and the latter was labeled as "indie rock." It's not LAUNCH's fault that these played; I had rated their genres high.
But considering most of my high-ranked artists were hard rock and metal, it was peculiar that such soft songs would play on my station.
My advice to LAUNCH users is keep your favorite artists limited to a particular genre or two and, if need be, create more than one station. The problem with trying to put everything you like on one station is your going to run into some bad apples that are guilty by (a slight) association.
3. Musicovery - Unlike the previously mentioned sites, Musicovery focuses less on songs and artists but instead on genres and moods. Each listener is given 18 genres to listen to and is allowed to check as many of the 18 as they like.
Listeners can also pick between which years the songs played are from and what mood the songs set, whether it be dark, positive, calm, or energetic.
Listeners can also decide whether the songs played were hits, have a high or low tempo, or are danceable. A number of songs are displayed on a screen once the options are picked.
The songs are scattered about with each one being connected to one another with a grey line. The line determines the order the songs will be played. Think connect the dots only there is no final picture.
Like the previously mentioned sites, Musicovery allows the listener to rate songs. They can either ban songs or add songs to their favorite list. From there, they can decide to play their favorite songs, favorite artists, or everything in their "musical universe."
One's "musical universe" is determined by their desired genres, moods, tempos, and favorite artists.
The beauty of Musicovery is there isn't a fast forward button but instead listeners can pick any song that appears on the screen to play.
Once the songs on the screen are all played, a new set of songs are picked. Listeners can change moods, genres, dance levels, and tempos at any point and the songs on the screen will adjust with the change of the preference.
However, Musicovery lacks variety. When I selected modern electro and pushed the tempo and dance feature up, about 15 songs were put on the screen. The problem?
Only two artists were represented: Daft Punk and David Guetta. Fortunately, I can move the cursor slightly towards the dance side and a brand new palette of selections comes on the screen. The same happens when I select a different song.
Nonetheless, Musicovery doesn't seem to have as many artists as the other two options.
Almost every combination of genres, moods, and tempos will result in a list where a few of the songs come from the same artist. At best, one will listen to a couple of songs by the same artist every time the palette is cleared. At worst, like noted before, only two artists will be represented out of the 15 songs displayed.
There are clearly some artists that are more favored by Musicovery than others. Examples include: Public Enemy, Bjork, Faith No More and Massive Attack.
One cannot but help to wonder how many artists allowed their music to be played on Musicovery. I would imagine it is quite a bit fewer than Pandora and LAUNCHcast.
While Musicovery certainly looks the cool and is probably the most unique of the three, the stations themselves lack diversity that will eventually drive listeners away.
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