Discovery, an adventure in alternative radio
XMU (XM), Left of Center (Sirius)
For the most part, I did not enjoy either one of these. The biggest problem? Replaying the same songs over and over and over just like any mainstream radio would. Sirius was particularly bad and thanks to Sirius I can never ever listen to the Raveonettes. Every 30 minutes or so the DJ would come on and say "Rachel Ray is a big fan of the Raveonettes, so here's a song for Rachel Ray." This NEVER got old for the DJ and it got so annoying that I almost always got a headache and turned it off. I don't want to hear the Ravonettes 4 times a day and I don't want to know about how celebrity chef Rachel Ray is a fan. XMU was better but there was still a lot of repeats. The one exception I found to the terribleness of commercial-free satellite indie radio was blog radio which played late at night on Sirius. On this show the DJs were bloggers who almost always played music that was new and interesting to me.
Online Radio
I tried a few online radio stations and finally decided that the best one was SomaFM. Nearly every popular internet radio service has an online station for independants but all of the fall to the same vices that XMU and Sirius do. Tons of repeats and a large majority of the songs weren't even from independent artists. I still listen to SomaFM a lot because of a large variety of music new and old. The only problem I encountered was occasionally their servers would overload and everything would start skipping and buffering. I can't listening to music with 10 second gaps.
Pandora
Pandora is freaking cool. The basic idea is that you enter a song into it and it uses the Music Genome Project to find similar artists and songs. The problem here is obvious, you don't get variety. When I enter in Neutral Milk Hotel it creates a station that almost always plays Elliot Smith as the third song. But wait!!!! You can train your station to have more variety... or less. Thumbs up or thumbs down on every song. Don't thumbs down a song if you like the song and just think it's executed poorly... just skip it! Pandora learns from you and tries to play music you'll like. The problem with me is that I'm not exactly sure what I like so I spent hours training my stations and I ended up with a station that played the theme from the Little Mermaid. What!? Why is it playing the Little Mermaid Theme? And there's another great feature. You can simply ask Pandora why it chose the song its playing. Apparently since I started with Beirut and thumbs-uped a song by the Microphones, it though I needed a melodic song with a strong horn section. It took me another half hour to get it to stop playing songs with "strong horn sections." Most of the time, I hate strong horn sections. I wish I could be more specific with Pandora and let it know that I don't like horns instead of telling it I don't like an entire song. Alas, if you've got a lot of free time, you can train some pretty cool stations. I had one that played Busta Rhymes followed by The Blow. It got me thinking that they should collaborate.
Amazon MP3 Direct
Okay, this doesn't count as online radio... but it's my main source for music once I've found out what I want to buy. Yes... I pay for music, pretty lame huh? Amazon MP3 Direct gives you fast downloads at awesome prices (usually $8 or $9 for an entire album). Best of all, no DRM! They're awesome quality MP3s with full ID3 tags. Amazon's servers are blazing fast, so I can download an entire CD in usually less than 5 minutes. Insound offers a similar service but has limited availability and Insound doesn't let you preview every song, however, they usually give you a free song in full. Amazon does its best to suggest other artists you might like and you can preview it all to get an idea.
posted by Jonathan Rowny at 1:34 PM
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