Chicago Tribune | Yahoo Wants to Look for Music

Okay, I have a Yahoo address, and I’ve been adding more and more content to “my” Yahoo page. And I like Internet radio, but can’t always play it successfully at work. So I checked out the new music service at Launch.

First of all – ease of use. It’s very easy to start listening, with no firewall problems at work, so that’ll increase the chances that I’ll use it both at work and at home. Second, although I haven’t used the search feature much, I can see that I’ll probably use it as much as iTunes, because it’ll also find free music downloads. Hmm.

Also, I like some of their “preset” stations, like “Cool as Folk.” But the really fun thing is that you can customize your own “station,” and it’s smart enough to figure out from your initial settings what you might like to hear. It’s not unlike the Radio@AOL/Radio@Netscape product, in that you can rate the songs as you hear them and click to purchase them…which I haven’t tried yet, since I think I’d have to download some software. However, you also have the option to SKIP a song and/or artist and click “Never play this selection again. So you can whip through a hell of a lot of music, rating and customizing as you go… and there are links to ratings by other people, and to their personal stations. So here’s my personal station, that I’ll probably be listening to a lot at work:

Radio Red57metoo

Here’s my profile/intro:

Welcome to Radio Red57metoo – electronic eclectica for weirdos with the attention span of a hyper-caffeinated gnat.

If they ever made a movie of my life, this would be the soundtrack. It would totally tank at the box office, and the CD would end up in cut-out bins around the world.

The cool thing is that you can search for artists, rate them highly, and they show up in your personal radio station’s playlist. I’m listening to a song off of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon album, just a few minutes after rating the album highly. Very cool.

The unintended fallout from this? I’ll probably drop my old AOL account at last, and keep only my old RED57 screenname for instant messaging, and move the one mailing list I’ve left subscribed at the old AOL address (HIGHLA-L) over to the red57metoo identity on Yahoo.

This will make my husband David happy, because I’ve been holding out on shitcanning the AOL account for just 1 reason: I like AOL Communicator because its got a link to Radio@AOL, which I used to use a lot. But I can get pretty much the same kind of email from… I don’t know, whatever the Mozilla email client is (David will correct me on this in comments). And Radio@AOL requires that full-boat AOL be up and running in order to link to albums and buy music, while Yahoo is already compatible with iTunes AND free music, as previously stated.

So it’s looking like it’s aloha, AOL, after 10 years.

Now, if I could just figure out how to publish an RSS feed of what I’m listening to on the blog… 😉