P.S. What, I’m supposed to use Netscape Navigator 4? Hi-ho, I’m surfing Arpanet! Sure, I guess I could download it from Decrepit Browser Depot, but then I could also turn on the radio.

Inspired by the latest entry at Yahoo! Music Blog, I registered at Last.fm and started feeding my playlist information to them via the AudioScrobbler iTunes plugin. My profile there is slowly building and I am looking forward to checking out what their…

I’ve also gone back to Pandora, and, taking Robert’s suggestion, entered a song title, with some pretty great results. I’m well versed in obscure bands, yet Pandora gave me artists I had never heard of that were also, in fact, similar to the song I had entered. I understand Pandora/Music Genome Project is a song-based recommendation system, so it might be that it works better when you enter a song rather than an artist. The obvious downside of Pandora is the user’s lack of control, including not knowing what is in the database.

While both Last and Pandora have done a better job than Launch of introducing me to new music in the recent past, this has a lot to do with the fact that they provide, for me, untapped databases of music. I would still recommend Launch as THE place to start exploring for newbies. But, I do wish it were easier to find the hidden gems in the Launch database. The algorithm prioritizes new releases, but most everything else has to be searched out artist by artist. Fan stations are useless, since they play the most popular songs in the artist’s given genre and little else. (I was going to include my rant about the Zombies fan station here, but I’ll spare you the gory details.)

In the end, I’m glad all of these sites exist. As far as music discovery options are concerned, I say the more, the merrier!

I’m serious. It’s a total dead end for someone with eclectic tastes like mine. Even after I based my station on a rock song, a rap song, a trance song, and throw in maybe Hootie and the Blow Fish for a few suprises, within a week I ended up with 10 drum-and-bass songs in a row. Who’s running this thing?

LaunchCAST has much more leniency especially with it’s moods. Sometimes I’m good for anything, other times, like during Calc homework, I need a something more ambient and electronic.

I love Y!ME so far. It has it’s kinks, but every other program in the world goes through the same. I’m gonna hang out with you guys for a while and watch what comes out.

Also, one feature I really would like to see you guys adopt: I would love it if I could with a simple click snatch the first 10 or 20 songs off of my recomended list and drop it into my MP3 player. Right now, I list all songs, drag the first 20-ish to a playlist, then drag the playlist to my MP3 player. I could do the automatic synch, but I’m still manually working with my playlists. Not a big deal, but it would really rock.

You know what those two services have over Yahoo Music? They work on my Mac and with Firefox.

I would really truly like to try your stations – they look Great. But I can’t.

Drop the MS Monopoly nonsense and gain some more customers (we’ve already proven we have open wallets – we bought a Mac, didn’t we?).

OpenTaste.org.

End-users want to be able to move their personalization and behavior patterns between systems.

I’ll leave it up to you nerds to figure out how to do it – but let’s not let these ‘tastes’ be used as a form of lock-in!

“The traditional radio model at least joined people in herded mediocrity.” You seem to be implying that traditional radio mediocrity is better that what we offer? Based on what value?

LAUNCHcast and recommendations leverage herds for their advantages, but do not reduce everyone’s experience to the lowest common denominator. They enable more diversified herds, each of which is more tuned to its members’ tastes than the traditional radio model.

Care to provide any evidence to support your theory that our recommendations and customized radio are described accurately by ANY of the $2 words you used?

* pernicious (causing great harm; destructive… of what?)
* reductivisitic (minimizing… our product does not focus on a few characteristics, but millions of music fans’ opinions, which are far from simplistic)
* arbitrary (seems like a filler adjective)
* dead-end (based on comments I’ve seen from many users, LAUNCHcast broadens music horizons both in terms of consumptions and relationships with other music fans. personally, the best man at my wedding was someone I met through LAUNCHcast 6 years ago because we shared music interest in an obscure artist. he’s still a great friend, and we would not have met through broadcast radio)
* singular (while there is individual control, recommendations are largely based on opinions of users with tastes in common)

Also, recommendation systems are not predicated on affinities being deterministic or music generating a universally singular response. One person can like a certain peanut butter and boysenberry jelly sandwich because of the chunky peanut butter. Another person can like it for the raspberry jelly. A good recommendation system can deduce chunky peanut butter tastes from boysenberry jelly tastes, and use that knowledge to recommend great foods that might taste nothing like either, but are nonetheless delicious to you and your idiosyncratic human art-loving herd.