Sort of like how, for a while, you could ask iTunes to be more random in its shuffle playback? Apple took away that option at some point, and the people at Pandora have traditionally shown an Apple-esque focus on simplicity over choice.
I love that Australia has a strong and healthy community radio scene.
I wonder how performance royalties for Web radio work there. In the U.S., they’re an enormous mess; sites like Pandora pay a much higher per-song rate than satellite radio, and infinitely higher than commercial FM (which pays nothing at all to musicians, only to songwriters).
Physical distribution of recorded music is hardly a wide-open egalitarian space.
Launchcast by Yahoo was what I always considered a best-in-class music streaming service. You could rate songs on a 1-100 scale, giving the service a way to differentiate between “This is my favorite song right now and I want to hear it a lot” versus “This is a nostalgic trip for me, and I want to hear it every 6 months”. It also let you follow friends and let their rating influence your stream.
Sadly, it went the way of just about everything cool that Yahoo had its fingers in, and was shut down.
Everything I’ve tried since has been a disappointment. Pandora in particular seems more in love with the science than with delivering me what I like to hear.
I’m not looking for a wide-open space. In fact, I want a very narrow space. Of my own choosing. Without the attempts to be concatcated into a pre-defined space for marketing. I know what I want (and it is not any form of “popular” music or a simply defined genre) and have no interest in being offered anything “different”. Any music service I’ve tried is not happy until it can connect me to a mass-market category and/or feeding me a predefined list of “marketable songs” and therefore wasting my time.
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