LAUNCHcast a treat for serendipitous listening |
Loading ...Here’s treat #1 for you today: go check out Yahoo’s LAUNCHcast radio.
Wait, internet radio haters, put away the reaper blades and give it a serious listen. Really. That means while you are working or playing today if you were lucky enough to get Satan’s holiday off, put it on in the background and rate the songs it serves. On a dark today like this, don’t you need some hardcore rock and roll in your lives?
To partake, you don’t have to download or install anything from their site (like their more bloated Y! Music client), although you are required to use Internet Explorer.
Need something to start out listening to? You can start by listening to my constantly evolving, terrifying station: MakeYouGoHmmdotcom LAUNCHcast station
Note: that station link will open and launch a window with the player so you can start listening. I don’t expect readers will like my music tastes, but if you like rock, particularly classic rock, hard rock, 70s-80s, then my feed should get you off to a solid rocking start.
Rock the office!
BTW, I wonder if the The Metal Show is doing anything Halloweenish tonight? Matt? Metal podcasters unite! United, United … United we stand …
I spent a lot of time listening to LAUNCHcast over last weekend and even chipped in for the subscription because I got tired of listening to ads every five songs, so my opinion that follows is not based on thirty minutes worth of listening, it’s based on many hours over several days of listening (yes, it’s playing now). It’s not required to pay for a subscription, but if you do then there’s a few more bennies.
Why internet radio does NOT suck
Time. To me, it’s all about time. Finding good music offline and/or online and organizing takes time. We’ve subscribed to/paid for online music subscriptions — my son has one to Napster right now in fact — and I’ve done the whole search through the database of a million plus songs and built playlist things but the problem again? Time. Time.
Time.
I would rather let the music play in the background and tell some system guess what I like, don’t like, and what I never ever want to hear again. Let it serve up songs I do like mixed with songs the system thinks I might like and learn from my ratings.
That’s exactly what LAUNCHcast does. The DJ that never sleeps. The musical delivery bot. Musicinator.
I almost never listen to music on traditional radio any more, what about you? Talk radio, yes, I do that frequently, but FM radio I pretty much have left for dead. In the car, it’s talk radio or MP3/CDs. While at the computer I like to listen to something besides silence, especially when I’m coding. A random mix of a huge playlist is good sometimes but those lists get stale, even with a large list (we have hundreds of CDs ripped and mixed into iTunes and Windows Media). The staleness is only replaced by new music coming in from somewhere, some place and I don’t want to invest the time to find it. Yeah, I’m a lazy music fan. I’d rather use that time exploring and/or coding new programs, products and services. Oh, and of course blogging and podcasting along the way!
What about being exposed to new music?
A random mix of music I’ve already purchased and ripped to MP3 doesn’t provide the serendipity factor that only radio mixed and provided by someone or something else can provide. Fellow music fans know that lucky, giddy feeling when a cool song comes on the radio we haven’t heard before. It’s like: hey, who is that by? We want to hear more!
With LAUNCHcast I’ve found their programming was scary good at figuring out what kind of music turns my crank. The more I rate, the better it seems to get.
Yeah, there’s the occasional trash that I have to send to never play again hell, but most of their selections are pretty accurate. I discovered a couple bands this weekend that I put on the CD wish list.
And rated songs I have (see screenshot above of my page showing nearly 1,000 ratings). I made those ratings while doing other things. LAUNCHcast put levels on the number of ratings made like Newbie, Listener, Enthusiast, Trendsetter, Fanatic and more. Whomever racks up 10,000 music ratings deserves to be coined a Rating Master. That dude/dudette must be in a rating frenzy.
My rating system is pretty straightforward:
It’s ok (1 star) - I can tolerate, barely, don’t really like them that much
I like it (2 stars) - wouldn’t mind hearing this song/artist/album once in awhile
I love it (3 stars) - play this a couple times a week in the song rotation, I’m grooving on it
Can’t get enough (4 stars) - please play this NOW, it totally jams!
Remember if a song comes on that you don’t like, just tell it never to play again and hit the skip button. You’ll be building your own musicinator.
What is LAUNCHcast missing?
A few things that would take this service from being cool to being extraordinarily mindbendingly cool are: an OPML export feed listing all my music ratings and an API to plug into. Listeners spent time generating the data, and what if they want to take that data with them, use on their website, etc? Yahoo should let at least their paid Plus subscribers take that info with them and/or be able to tap into that with an API. If this functionality exists already, please somebody drop me a pointer in the comments/trackback area. I realize Yahoo has an API for Y! Music but nothing seems to exist for LAUNCHcast. I hope this Y! Music bias is not an indication that LAUNCHcast’s days are numbered(?).
So give LAUNCHcast a try (or another try if you’ve done so before) and then see if it treats you to some music you like that you haven’t heard before today.
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- Use your microphone to try identifying what song is playing
- Jarett from Revel on the Indie artist perspective on music downloads
- Looking for bands/artists to play/promote
hey, you know I am always honored to be mentioned in your blog!!
In fact, The special Halloween edition of the show, is hosted by Fear Factory (”fear” of course, ties in nicely to Halloween!) and we have some special Halloween music mixed in from Helloween, and King Diamond.
Should have it up and online a bit later, just in time for the ghouls and goblins to enjoy in the waning moments of the day, after all the little ghouls and goblins are in bed!
Comment by Matt Wardlaw — October 31, 2005 @ 3:36 pm PST
Awesome, post back here or trackback when you get that haunting up, Matt!
Comment by TDavid — October 31, 2005 @ 3:40 pm PST
Halloween fun show online now - yeah yeah, it’s the day after, but still just as much fun!
http://www.themetalshow.com/blog/?p=189
Comment by Matt Wardlaw — November 1, 2005 @ 9:17 am PST
[…] Similar to Yahoo LAUNCHcast’s learning and selection engine, I missed the first wave checking out 10 free hours of Pandora when it was in beta. Then they left beta and started charging and most of their buzz dissipated. Funny, how charging for something can kill momentum, isn’t it? […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Free ad-supported version of Pandora available — November 13, 2005 @ 7:51 pm PST
[…] Pick List The object is to search around and save products to a list. You can create your own list or use one of the pre-defined lists: My Wish List and Stuff I Own. I added a few CDs [see my Yahoo Shopping Wish List] I’ve been enjoying listening to tracks on LAUNCHcast [Hmm review]. CDs I’d like to own. One of which we already ordered through Amazon that wasn’t available in any retail stores (a Quiet Riot CD from 2001). […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Checking out Shoposphere — November 18, 2005 @ 8:26 am PST
Launchcast BLOWS!
I have been a subscriber to Launchcast Plus for several years. I had rated alot of music and I had a station that sounded great ( at least for my tastes). Recently the sound of my station changed. I was hearing way too many artists repeat and alot of crap music that never should have been appearing on my station. When I asked Yahoo about it, they informed me that they were in negotiations with some record companies for the licensing of certain artists. The bottom line is their catalog has been cut almost in half and they never bothered to inform me. It’s insane that they would eliminate that much product and think that no one would notice!
I once praised Launchcast but they continue to be unresponsive and disrespectful to their paying subscribers.
I will longer recommend them until they shape up. Try Rhapsody instead.
Comment by Mel Barasso — December 11, 2005 @ 3:50 pm PST
Mel - I was a Rhapsody subscriber for over a year, then tried Napster for awhile, then Y! Music. I get a few songs that I don’t like, but I just skip past them with LC. Have you tried Pandora? http://www.pandora.com/
Comment by TDavid — December 11, 2005 @ 4:05 pm PST
TDavid.
I’m not sure if you’ve listened to Launchcast recently but it’s been severely changed with the loss of tons of artists. Maybe it’s just my music tastes that happen to have a majority of artists reduced but I can’t imagine that’s the case.The problem isn’t so much that I hear stuff I don’t like (although that does bother me), what really sucks is my playlist has been cut in half! It’s probably even more than that and that makes the station almost unlistenable. I did try Pandora and although I did hear an artist repeated in the first hour, it sounded much better than my current Launcast station.I think I might be making the switch soon. Thanks for the tip.
Comment by Mel Barasso — December 12, 2005 @ 6:42 am PST
Hi Mel, since I’m still paying for it, I try and listen to it every day. Listened to it all yesterday and my LC station is still playing primarily the music I like. It is possible that the loss of artists you cite are artists I don’t like anyway, so I’ve not been noticeably impacted. My station is linked on the front page under my picture (as of this writing) and my preference is primarily 60s-80s rock and classic rock.
In fact, through LC, I became motivated recently to buy a couple CDs I might not otherwise have bought. If it stops suggesting and playing music it thinks I might like (that I actually don’t like) then I’ll stop paying the 3 bones a month. Otherwise, it’s a good way to sample the music without having to go with a full online subscription for $7 or more a month. I do this by marking any song with five stars that I want to hear again and sure enough if I listen long enough, LC will play that song again. And again. After a few listens I can decide whether to go out and buy the CD or buy it online.
Glad to hear you like Pandora. I might switch to that if I start seeing LC suck like you have, but so far it’s been good. I’m listening to it now and it just played one of my favorite Scorpions song.
Comment by TDavid — December 12, 2005 @ 9:34 am PST
[…] Subscribers will drive this program. It sounded somewhat like LAUNCHcast and Pandora. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » CES 2006 Bill Gates keynote — January 4, 2006 @ 10:26 pm PST
[…] This week I’ve been checking out the music recommendation and sharing service iLike beta by the folks behind Garageband. If you use iTunes then iLike will analyze your iTunes song database and recommend free songs from Garageband you can download as well as recommend other similar songs you might like. This is similar to services like last.fm formerly known as audioscrobbler or Launchcast that was reviewed last Halloween. You can optionally download from iLike a free sidebar utility for iTunes (Mac and Windows versions) that will related music to songs as they are played, show what your friends are listening to and provide a quick link to your profile. You can listen to a short sample of some songs you don’t own but a few seconds of a song is rarely enough to know for sure if it’s good. […]
Pingback by Recommending music iLike » Make You Go Hmm — October 26, 2006 @ 7:06 pm PST