discover more music that you’d like
My friend and co-worker Scott Wennermark tipped me off to www.pandora.com, a very nifty, free web-based music station, that learns your musical taste based on your feedback, and has a neural network + artificial intelligence kind of way to suggest other music you’d like. They also have a blog to keep the public informed on latest developments – a great way to use blogging for startups and corporations.
And I had found (or read somewhere) this new(?) online music store called www.emusic.com . I didn’t find it easy to browse the music library without registering, but they’re offering 50 FREE music downloads for an iPod or any MP3 player! If I read their terms right, there’s no messy digital rights to manage, no special encoding, just lots of independent music and some mainstream ones too that you can use on your PC or Mac, portable music player, burn onto CDs, whatever. As William Shatner would say: Brilliant!
As an aside, found out my lil’ brother Deef started blogging. Early entries on cheesecake, cars, and calumniation. Okay, I used a thesaurus to force the alliteration.
Launch was bought out by Yahoo years ago and it’s the same thing: music.yahoo.com (LaunchCast Radio).
Rob, While there are some similarities to LaunchCast Radio, Pandora has these notable differences:Pandora streams in Macromedia Flash vs. LaunchCast in Windows Media Player, Pandora links to iTunes (iPod friendly) or Amazon vs. LaunchCast and its Yahoo Music Engine (not iPod friendly), and entirely different algorithm at finding similar music styles.
last.fm (http://www.last.fm/) is a nice alternative to pandora. the good thing is, it comes with a stand-alone player.
chris ruzin has a good description of the service here (http://www.chrisruzin.net/index.php/entry/lastfm/).
One other thing…
http://www.pandora.com also has a great way to listen to holiday music. Simply put your favorite artist or song in the interface and then the word holiday.