December 20, 2002
Get to know new music on launchcast
As is evident by my CD collection, I have a rather eclectic taste in music. Most of the music I listen to would be classified as 'Electronica' or 'Techno'. Since it tends to be softer and smoother than house music I prefer to call it 'technoambiance'. Finding good technoambiance music can be very challenging. There is not a lot of information out in the public domain on interesting and complex electronic music. The best way to get to know new music seems to be to find someone who has similar interests and to then compare notes, trade CDs. There is one online tool that is quite excellent for finding new music though: Yahoo Launchcast.
Launchcast, like most Internet radio stations streams genre music over a real audio encoded stream along with information on the artist and the album. Unlike other Internet radio stations Launchcast allows you to use your yahoo account to create a personalized channel that streams music you rate as music you like. Even better, the system uses your ratings to recommend other music that might interest you. The result can be quite awesome.
According to Launchcast I have now rated over 3,400 songs, albums and groups on My Station. The resulting station is pretty well tuned to my likes. I get a lot of my favorite groups such as Dead Can Dance and Orbital, but along with it comes the occasional new song for me to rate. It was a couple of months ago that Launchcast played Fun For Me by Moloko, introducing me to a song that quickly became a favorite. The advertisers on the site would be glad to know that I have now purchased more than one CD after hearing a sample on Launchcast.
The rating and recommendation system is of course imperfect. I do not know how many rap artists I have told Launchcast to not play, yet it occasionally wants to send another one my way. I do not want to kill the whole genre (you can rate genres as well as artists, albums and songs) since there is the occasional rap song that I would like to hear, so I resort to rating individual artists to zero when they come up. At least it is not trying to play me any country or western.
