Regular radio is a pretty moribund medium that exists only to deliver your ears to advertisers. They want to play you inoffensive music you know so you'll stick around for the ads, which is why the "alternative" stations in Boston often end up playing the same Nirvana song at the same time. That record is going to be 20 years old next year. Or, to put it another way, next year Nevermind will be as old as Led Zeppelin 4 was when Nevermind came out. Making those radio stations still playing it to death just as dull as the ones who were still playing "Stairway to Heaven" in heavy rotation in 1991.
As I've mentioned before, my Sirius receivers kept getting stolen out of my cars, so I'm through with them. I do miss the service a lot, but it just doesn't work for me. So off to the internet to discover music.
I know that websites can change in a heartbeat, and what's good now may seem hopelessly sucky in a year. (remember myspace? I haven't logged into my account there in the better part of a year.)
So I stream a lot of music at work--not while I'm teaching, but when I'm facing down a huge stack of papers, for example.
I've used Pandora a lot, and I probably don't need to explain how that service works. It's cool as hell, but it's started seeming way less cool, for the following reasons:
1.) The repetition. Whatever algorithm they use to generate music similar to the artist you've put in seems to get stuck in a rut pretty quickly. Even if I've added several artists to a station, I end up hearing the same songs over and over, and if I wanted that, I could just turn on the regular radio. (I have more thoughts about regular radio coming soon).
2.) Ads and listening limits. Every site must eventually monetize, and so I don't begrudge Pandora their ads. They're now limiting ad-supported listening to 40 hours a month, though, which is kind of obnoxious. But then again, they are offering the ad-free premium subscription for a pretty reasonable price. I probably would have gone for it if I hadn't been trying out last.fm.
Last.fm finds related music in a different, and apparently better way--by tracking what its users are listening to. You download a little gadget that uploads track information from songs you play on your personal library as well as on the streaming service. It turns out that this gives way, way better results on what's related than Pandora's "music genome project."
Here's an example. I created a Queens of the Stone Age station on both services. This is a band I like but haven't taken the plunge into actually purchasing any music from yet. Pandora served up a rather predictable stew of alt-rock like the Foo Fighters, whereas Last.fm introduced me to Kyuss and the "desert rock" movement, which I had no idea even existed. While I have discovered some cool music on Pandora, most notably James Kochalka, it seems like last.fm is going to lead me into more interesting places.
Until it starts to suck.
My old pals at mog.com have launched a music service that looks promising, so perhaps that'll be next.
